Why REST is good and SOAP is evil
On behalf of my employer Valtech, I’ve written a piece on why I dislike SOAP, and favor REST. I originally wrote it in english, but the published version is in swedish.
For some REST preaching in hum-humpty-dum-dee-dum’ish go to http://valtech.se/templates/JobSubPage.aspx?id=2582.
Update: As suggested by people more intelligent than myself, anchor tags really should have text inside them to be useful :).
April 17th, 2006 at 22:30
Dude, the link text is empty.
April 18th, 2006 at 0:03
I think you might want to put some text inside that anchor tag. It’s hard to click on it otherwise.
April 18th, 2006 at 3:41
hi there,
Add some text for the anchor tag otherwise, view source is the only way out.
thanks,
BR, ~A
April 18th, 2006 at 3:41
hi there,
is there an english version at all ?
thank you,
BR, ~A
April 19th, 2006 at 16:57
It’s hard for me to say much, since I don’t read Swedish. But I am the author Programming Web Services With Perl, and I have yet to hear one REST evangelist give a good answer to this one question:
How exactly do you express complex data structures? I mean, really complex, like .NET services? Like MapPoint.NET, for example?
And if you cook up a REST-based scheme for a complex type, how do you express more than one in the same request? I did a project while at my last job that interfaced with MapPoint. Their structures are not huge, but they are complex and nested. And we frequently sent multiples of the same type in a request (start and end point, to obtain driving directions between the two– two instances of a type that was complex and multi-layered).
There is a finite limit to the URI. There’s a limit to POST data as well, but it’s measured in a greater order of magnitude.
There will always be a place for something like REST in simple services like Amazon, etc. But this constant “SOAP is eeeeevil because I can solve all my problems with REST” is really getting old. Sorry to be so harsh, but just because your tasks are simple-enough for REST, doesn’t mean everyone else’s are as well.
April 24th, 2006 at 10:42
Randy - I am not familiar with MapPoint.NET. As I am just recovering from appendix removal surgery, please give me a few days to look into it before I answer.