I’ve talked about both the
pluses and minuses
of
Amazon‘s
approach to Web Services
for some time now. Recently, I’ve heard that they’re in the process of
greatly expanding those services, which is great. But I think that before
they go too far with that, they should really dig a little deeper to learn
why it is exactly that their “RESTful” data retrieval services are getting the
uptake
they are. I don’t think it’s controversial to claim that Amazon see the REST vs Web
services debate as primarily about
encodings;
either a message is encoded as a SOAP envelope, or it’s encoded as a URI, but in
both cases the abstract message – the information being conveyed – is identical.
I completely disagree, of course, and believe that there’s a very large
architectural difference between those two approaches; that in http URI form,
the URI isn’t the message, and instead, the surrounding HTTP message which
encapsulates that URI becomes the real message,
Windows 7 64 Bit, while the URI itself is treated
as an opaque bag-o-bits. Through this encapsulation, GET becomes the operation. What I just described I refer to as “accidentally RESTful”, and it’s
sur-
prisingly
common.
And while, for the simple data retrieval case,
Windows 7 Key, it is RESTful,
and a significant improvement over vanilla SOA,
Office 2007 Serial, you’ll find that as you
add support for state-changing actions and just generally evolve that
application over time, you’re going to run into many of the same problems
you’d run into doing SOA. Fair warning! Update; oh, I suppose this is,
Office 2007, in part, a response to
something Dare said
a couple of weeks back; those APIs he lists
ARE RESTful,
Office 2007, at least with respect to using the uniform interface. No related posts.