Every few months or so, another 100K or so of uninformed and sloppy writing is generated comparing Web services to REST. I've now found the analogy. It's the "war in Iraq". Let's compare and contrast.
Iraq
At this moment, cnn.com has one article in the World section about Prisoner counts doubling in Iraq.
Web services/REST
No blog entries in the past couple weeks.
Iraq:
Last few articles talked about "Increasing insurgent activity"
WS/REST
Last serious article on Tim Bray's Blog talked about "Web Services rumble getting remarkably loud"
Iraq:
Precious little knowledge about what's actually going on. Is it safer? More unsafe? Are the people happier, unhappier?
WS/REST
Precious little knowledge about what's actually going on. Are companies deploying Web services/REST? What is the actual WS/REST traffic on Web apps?
Iraq:
Everybody's agenda influences what they say. Those that say going to war was a good thing only quote good things, those that are opposed only quote bad things.
WS/REST
Same as Iraq. My favourite example is people talking about Amazon's "REST" API being 85% of the traffic, when it's not a REST api at all and the 85% traffic has been disavowed.
Iraq:
The aggressors/liberators motives distrusted. For oil, democracy?
WS/REST
The WS-* folks motives distrusted. REST folks think they want to do a stack swap and replace HTTP, TCP, URIs with SOAP+WS-RM+WS-Addressing+SOAP/UDP+binaryXML.
Iraq:
The nay-sayers never acknowlege any positives of invading/liberating Iraq.
WS/REST
The nay-sayers never acknowlege any postives of WS. Tim Bray links to Carlos Perez's articles on REST better than WS-* but fails to mention Chris Ferris' awesome debunking of Carlos in "1+1=0".
Iraq:
Sometime soon, there will be some more poor boys and/or gals from Iowa, Ohio, etc. that will be killed. Some press will call it "increasing insurgency".
WS/REST
Sometime soon, some new blogo/wiki/email/ flame war will break out. People will talk about "Death of Web services".
What's it mean?
In the Web services vs REST debate, the sad part is that the communities are not coming closer together. There are things that could be done for Web services to integrate with REST but few people from either camp are jumping up and down. And there certainly is no progress in getting to agreement on any kind of principled approach towards the discourse, like having an actual framework or architecture for evaluating the various arguments.
And we sure are not having the really important debate about how to best to architect an asynchronous applications and stacks, which I think is the key innovation behind WS-*. What are the technical trade-offs between HTTP + TCP + "content-location" vs SOAP + WS-RM + WS-Addressing + SOAP/UDP? You'd think the REST folks could *at least* use the architectural properties of key interest from the REST thesis when they are attack Web services. Funny how the REST advocates won't use the formal model of REST to evaluate WS-*. At least I did the hard work and wrote up a comparison of EPRs to URIs using the REST properties
We're at the same situation in WS/REST as we are in modern press reporting. People are regularly offering biased and inaccurate opinions, refering to and using biased and inaccurate opinions they've been fed, and a general malaise in doing the actual hard work in the background research.
The truth is always the first casualty, and the WS/REST debate has shown that the technical community is just as bad as the rest of politics.
What I don't quite get is why so many in the the technical community have this smug superiority complex about the "truth" that they offer, almost invariably bash W and what goes on in the administration, and yet can't see the similarities. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, and if technologists don't like the way some organizations don't do the hard work and bias everything, the last thing that a technologist should do is follow the same pattern yet remain self-righteous.
To execute on "act local think global", I call on technical people to engage in deeply technical debates and less on "marketing" campaigns. Do the work, present the facts, and propose actual technical analysis.
Hi Dave,
I think you're probably right. At the beginning of the month, I hit my personal tolerence on these things (http://atownley.blogspot.com/2005/03/get-over-it-its-tool-not-religion.html), and I would most certainly agree with the tone of your post here.
I think the main problem is that everyone is reacting from their own assumptions and prejudices without actually examining them critically to actually know why they're saying what they're saying. Maybe some people are, but a lot aren't. Only when people are able to clear away all the crap and examine, as you said, the actual merits of each approach for a given situation will the real issues start to surface. No one approach is always going to be right, but the wisdom is in knowing why.
interesting (and amusing) post. do you have a link for the disavowal of the Amazon #'s? i've used that figure a lot myself - quoted direct from Jeff Barr - and if it's fradulent i'd love to see the correction. thx.
Nice post. I was a bit skeptical about the analogy but you handled it well. Technology is not religion - people need to stop being such zealots about it.
BTW - not all of us like to bash W.
Not sure you're on the right track with REST *vs* WS. Of course REST is a web service, even without a SOAP or RPC underpinning. I do have a few more words to say for those interested if you follow my link. Very good post though.
>>Every few months or so, another 100K or so of uninformed and sloppy writing is generated comparing Web services to REST.
Add to that poor analogies.
By adding politics to your posts, you've alienated about 50% or so of your readers.
You seem to know very little about the Iraq situation, other than the redundant "increasing insurgency". I'd suggest a little research. Turn off Fox and turn on to:
http://www.npr.org or
http://www.democracynow.org
There should be more, but such is the state of media under right wing control currently.
Mike, sorry you find the post offensive. However, you make the assumption that I watch Fox. Never have. I mostly listen to CBC or read the National Post to balance my coverage.
I think you missed the entire point of the my post, which is that:
1) Web services vs REST comparisons are almost always done with poor accuracy and are positional;
2) This feels to me very similar to the reporting on Iraq, where I can't find an unbiased source of news and I find it difficult to get a feel for the true situation and motivation.