04/01/09 :: [REST] Today is a Great Day [permalink]
Today is a great day, I decided to free myself from the REST debate. I exchanged a last email with Francois Leygues who argued that even if REST added nothing to Middleware, "we would not be loosing anything" by using REST, so what is my problem? Francois, I give up, in front of such a pile of BS, I have nothing else to say, you win. For the Nth time, you loose bidirectional interfaces, assemblies, forward compatible versioning, orchestration... you loose the foundation to build true connected systems and I can freely and safely conclude that you have no idea what you are talking about. You are simply XML challenged and you have no idea what a composite application and a connected system is. Unfortunately, I have to live every day with the limitation of the synchronous client/server programming model that you are so much in love with.
REST gives you a choice between the plague and the cholera. You can choose between CRUDing or by hand coding your IDL. Yeap those were the days when you opened a socket and hand coded your request in a String and you wrote your own parsers to parse the request or the response. The RESTafarians (a.k.a the middleware hobbyists) want you to return to pre-CORBA days, then a genius will automate all this handcoding and show how they can layer CORBA on top of HTTP. All the progress made Service Orientation, Event Orientation and even Resource Orientation are about to be washed away.
Even Tim Bray himself can't use REST in a Resource Orientated way. How ironic, Tim.
So, so long and thank you for wasting every body's time, this is exactly what our industry needs, I can't wait until billions or resources are deployed right and left and then we will talk again. This seems in line with our society, so who I am to say anything. Today, is a great day.