2008/7/28 Mark Baker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > On 7/28/08, Sanjiva Weerawarana <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Mark Baker wrote: >> > >> > Absolutely. If you need to publish outwardly-facing services to >> > multiple parties, use REST which was designed for *exactly* that >> > purpose. But if you won't *ever* need to expose your services >> > publicly over their lifetime, then of course, please consider SOA. If >> > you're not sure, and you might want to open up your services later, >> > then I think the choice is also clear. Oh, and even if you know >> > they'll only ever be used internally, REST is still an option, as it's >> > the general case. >> > >> > No religion required. >> >> >> Um sure Mark. Sure. Par for the course, coming from you! Glad to see that >> RESTafarian koolaid is still strong in you ;-). > > Of course it's par for the course with me. I've been predicting SOAP > would never see widespread use outside the firewall
What do you use as a measure of "widespread"? Revenue of companies using it, employee counts, value per transaction, total value of transactions, blog hits? Now I personally know of quite a few companies doing it beyond firewalls but these companies tend not to think of it as impressive or interesting as its just about the implementation. > - as well as > explaining the technical reasons why - for over eight years now. And > hey, whad'ya know; despite hundreds of millions (billions?) of dollars > invested by everybody who matters in the industry, it's not seeing > widespread use outside the firewall. That really does come down to the definition of widespread, hell even of firewall if you are talking about internet v VPN v leased line, etc. I'm not exactly seeing a lot of widespread use of REST "outside of the firewall" in B2B scenarios either (unless you can point to heavy B2B use I'm missing). Now if you say that EDI is still the dominant model then fair enough and I'd say that FTP dumping is still pretty big. It takes quite a long time for this groups to do the formalisation and approval that gets these things moving and yup it often starts internally as B2B is scary and slow. SWIFT for instance added SOAP support after they saw it being used internally by clients. Interestingly despite being supporters and users of SOAP what they normally talk about is how that is just a channel and the important bit is understanding the broader business interactions. I know when I first did a SOAP beyond the firewall implementation (2001 to link a Call Centre company with a utility company) I didn't really tell anyone that I was doing SOAP I just said that I was doing an integration over the internet that the security department agreed to (client and server side SSL certs with the route banged down to the two end point domains). Now it was certainly SOAP through the firewall but I didn't actually think this was the clever bit (after all it was just cheaper than doing a VPN or leased line solution and using another integration technology like MQSeries). > > No koolaid required, just knowledge of *both* Internet scale systems > and software architecture. But not business? Steve PS Internet scale predates WWW and HTTP. > > Mark. >
