No. It's Just About the Metadata.

If an ad-supported blog exists to stir the pot then I supposed the GigaOM network's future of software blog is succeeding. I thought the first post was tennis without a net. Actually I also thought the second post was tennis without a net. And now I think the latest, "Web Services war is over: Time to Rest" is just bogus hype. Not that REST isn’t gaining ascendancy, but it’s a case of the straw man fallacy.

The war was never between REST and WS-* specs: the WS-* specs have been despised, ignored, and abused since their introduction.

Nor is it between REST and SOAP (and the xml schema documents that go with SOAP, which are also despised) which WS-* was meant to supplement.

It’s a war of describing operation semantics versus hoping that they will be “implicitly self-describing” and that everyone can agree on what GET, PUT, DELETE, POST etc. mean.

 The latter, which is the purist REST position, works well for documents (e.g., HTML pages on the web), and alright for basic business objects (calendar appointment, car maintenance record) but gets a lot trickier for transactional services like “change John's seat on the second jetBlue segment today to 13A, or else the window seat closest to the front of the cabin, or else fail fast and give me a set of alternate available seats.” Can this be done with REST? Yes … kinda sorta … but the call will not be one of those trivial “implicitly self-describing operations on an entity” that REST works very well for.

The good news is that, in reality, both camps are converging on a compromise: REST with (optional) metadata: WADL, OpenSearch, WRDL, even the much-maligned (and for good reason) WSDL 2.0. The metadata supports tooling, automated strong bindings, better testing, automatic integration to enterprise object buses etc.

This is a philosophical step away from REST, but this is actually what we’re seeing coming down the pike for enterprise work, and the SOAP and WS-* people will be just fine with it.