Hi Anne, all:
Anne Thomas Manes wrote:
> The reason why the getVersion service works as a RESTful service is
> that it only supports the GET operation. If you really want to support
> REST then you need to put constraints on the types of resources and
> the available methods that can be exposed via a REST interface.
>
> If you're tunneling an operation name via the interface, then it isn't
> REST. It's POX.
>
> (Ignore me if you want, but I just had to say it.)
+1. I think the work that's been done is great in its own way, but a
lot more thought needs to go into making this right - and "right" in
this case does not mean exposing every method on a service via POX
(although that can have its place too).
As a start, we should be able to configure any method on a service as
the "GET" method - as Chinthaka noted, if there is only one method it
can default to that, and if there are more you should be able to choose
one. In general this points to a way to link up HTTP operations with
particular WS methods - i.e. we can do the same with PUT, DELETE, etc.
I think the interesting next step will be resource-enabling data that
lives behind a WS interface, and there's a potentially valuable niche
here. Imagine I have an employee management service, which lets me walk
the organizational hierarchy of my company...
EmployeeService {
Employee [] getEmployees();
Employee getEmployee(String name);
void addEmployee(Employee employee);
}
Employee {
String getName();
Employee getManager();
}
What I want is to be able to map GET on http://server/employees to the
getEmployees() operation, and return a chunk of XML with links in it:
<employees>
<employee uri="http://server/employees/Fred"/>
<employee uri="http://server/employees/Wilma"/>
</employees>
Then if I do a GET on Fred's URI, I'd get something like:
<employee>
<name>Fred</name>
<manager uri="http://server/employees/MrSlate"/>
</employee>
That means mapping the "/Fred" suffix somehow to call
getEmployee("Fred")... and then maybe allowing PUTs or POSTs to the
Fred-specific URI in order to edit data about an employee. There are of
course other ways to do this as well, this is just an example.
This kind of thing, as I understand it, would be more heading towards
RESTful services. It's the mapping that's tricky, which is why efforts
like the recent RESTful Java JSR submission have been starting up...
--Glen
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