SOA with REST title now available worldwide

Gentlefolk,

I haven't posted here for a while, but many of you know me as having been
active to varying degrees in the REST community for about 6 years now. I
have some significant experience implementing REST in machine to machine
environments (browser free environments) in backend business systems,
realtime safety-related control systems, and a number of other esoteric
environments that involve leading people and negotiating internal and
business to business interfaces with people with varying levels of REST
expertise and enthusiasm. Over the last few years I have been working with
a number of others on the title mentioned in the subject line.

It's a title I don't expect to pass by this list without criticism. It uses
vocabulary that is often more on the SOA side than on the REST side. It
focuses on REST "service contracts" (the set of urls exposed by a server
and the server-specific meaning of standard methods and media types in
those resources) as a standard tool for governing "REST services" as part
of an overall service inventory. It focuses almost entirely on machine to
machine interaction within the context of IT assets of a single enterprise.
It doesn't deal much with browsers or mashups and it even spends a
significant amount of time addressing issues like transactions and pub/sub.
Perhaps for some the very fact that Thomas Erl's name is on the cover well
push some buttons :)

Nevertheless we collectively and I in particular have worked hard not to
compromise on REST principles and constraints while still making the
content accessible to SOA people and the general population. Within this
context of heavy machine to machine interaction we deal with defining a
uniform interface to cover an inventory of services within a particular
enterprise, and how that should relate to service contracts and to broader
standardisation efforts. We look to move past SOA's traditional limit of
increasing intrinsic interoperability only within a given inventory and
instead look for standard methods and media types to increase
interoperability to more massive scales.

We have sought to keep hypermedia core to the practice of building
inventories of services and their related customers and to minimise
coupling while also being explicit about why we do this. We have sought to
drive a hard line on the stateless constraint and what that means to the
aforementioned patterns of transactions (promoting compensating over
atomic) and pub/sub (promoting cached polling and delta encoding).

Some of you have already seen the material in various stages of completion
as have many SOA guys. Over the last six months or so the manuscript
changed significantly as we worked that feedback into the finished product.

No book is perfect, but I hope this one will end up bringing the REST and
SOA worlds together in a closer understanding without compromising one iota
of what is important to each. I'm confident that despite the unfamiliar
wording, context and audience that the book is written to be applied to
that at its heart is a true application of REST constraints and to every
possible extent a true application of the years of experience the REST
community has developed.

The book is available in ebook and hard cover:
Amazon - http://amzn.com/0137012519
Barnes and Noble -
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/SOA-with-REST/Thomas-Erl/e/9780137012510(seriously?
No permalink?)
Home - http://servicetechbooks.com/rest

Comments, discussion and criticism (timidly) welcome. I can't think of a
better place to discuss the end result than this list.