Talk:REST vs. SOAP

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Revision as of 22:34, May 9, 2006 by Rhusar (talk | contribs)

What links here: REST vs. SOAP

URL(REST) vs. SOAP Interface

The business world has long ago made this jump, and all of the scientific IT folks need to make the leap. In most languages, it is two lines of code to create a proxy object from the WSDL file and then call a (service) method on that object. It takes a bit more code to publish a SOAP service, but it's also easy in most programming languages.

People should not be religious about either one-line URL's (REST) or SOAP. Not everything can be "shoehorned" into a one-line URL and the attempt to do so often leads to inconsistent, ad hoc, or not fully specified interfaces. OGC has spent a lot of effort in the last few years on cleaning up the WMS/WCS/WFS interfaces, which were unclean in the first place because they were informally specified as one-liners.

Rudy and others, I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but not everyone is fully aware of these issues. As I've said many times, an XML schema formalizing the interface should come first, and then one can describe the rules for "flattening" a service call into a one-liner. OGC has gone this route, finally. Brian D. Wilson (BrianWilson) 00:22, 10 May 2006 (EDT)