Re: Roy's ApacheCon presentation

Mike,

You snipped out the HTTP/WSDL bit.  Do you agree that HTTP defines an
interface in the same way that a WSDL document does?

On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 12:10:58PM -0700, Champion, Mike wrote:
> If "interface" is defined as some fundamental unit of information, yes. Less
> is more. Things should be as simple as possible. 
> 
> But if "interface" is defined as a mapping onto procedural code and takes no
> account of the complexity of the information passed to and from the
> procedure, I wouldn't agree. 

Hard to say.  An interface is an interface.  It's not a mapping; that's
the extra code you have to write to map from your procedural code to that
interface.

> Uhh, Mark, is there some new twist to this debate that is not obvious to me?

Just the integration complexity issue.  I don't think I've mentioned
that before, and Roy did mention it in public while criticizing Web
services, so I thought the WG would like to know.

Obviously the followup is a bit of deja-vu.

> This seems like pretty familiar territory.  You won't win it by appealing to
> Dr. Fielding's authority, or the TAG's authority ... you'll win if you can
> point people to these powerful "web services" that you say are so easy to
> build with the REST architectural style.

Well, some people do believe that Web services are consistent with Web
architecture, as some comments I got back after my REST presentation at
the previous f2f showed.  That's why I'm appealing to authority.

And every time I try to provide examples, I either get shot down with
"it's for humans" (despite it being XML, like a URI to an RSS blog), or
I get no responses about the substance of the example[1].

But there's these, I suppose, which I've also mentioned without
receiving any feedback;

http://soap.4s4c.com/registration/rounds/
http://soap.4s4c.com/registration/tests/
http://soap.4s4c.com/registration/toolkits/

They're SOAP 1.2 based services that use GET and return URIs.

 [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/2002Mar/0048

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.  Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.   http://www.markbaker.ca

   Will distribute objects for food