On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 9:45 AM, Michael Lyons <maill...@ittworx.com> wrote:
> REST is what SOAP should have been, but something along the way just went > wrong. > I'd strongly disagree with this. REST and SOAP have fundamentally different design goals. If the SOAP designers came up with REST they would've failed their goals miserably. For a start, SOAP is transport agnostic whereas REST is designed to use the features of HTTP. REST goes much further than just using pretty urls. e.g. you making use of the correct HTTP verbs for your operations. SOAP doesn't make use of HTTP features because then you couldn't apply it to a non-HTTP transport. It's easy to dismiss SOAP as poorly designed because REST does what you want more easily, but SOAP is capable of much, much more (and not just discovery) albeit with greater complexity. Also, in my experience many REST APIs fail to truly embrace the philosophy behind REST and simply use it to put different RPC style operations behind different urls. ciao, Richard
