Yes, the term "REST" and it's cousin "REST-ful" are some of my least
favorite these days. They were watered down and misinterpreted from
day 1. The concept of them has been around for years, but people
started applying it to everything that isn't SOAP, which is just silly.
The thing to keep in mind with REST that most tools ignore is the
separation of verbs and nouns. The "nouns" are addressable resources
and verbs are used to interact with the nouns... with various verbs
mapped to the exist HTTP request type (ie GET, POST, etc).
I like the idea of separation of verbs and nouns (which OAGIS does a
decent job of, and with a set of nouns that is much more business
friendly), but most of the REST ideas are rather... limiting. They are
fine for CrUD types of operations, but not much more given the limited
set of available verbs.
Still, the theory is somewhat irrelevant since the common usage of the
term "REST" has been reduced to near meaningless. Sometimes it seems
that people like to seem fancy, but all too often can live up to the
fanciness they created for themselves.
Anyway, for OFBiz the main concept from REST and OAGIS that we might
consider implementing is support in the service engine for a
separation of verbs and nouns. We have common service naming patterns
that we use in a de-facto sort of way, like the service
"createProduct" which has the noun "Product" and the verb "create". It
would be cool if the service definition supported this sort of 2-part
naming, and with a way to associate nouns to entities when applicable
(and of course nouns could be things other than entities, like XML
schemas or whatever).
I'm not sure that is helpful commentary, but there are some thoughts
on the issue anyway (which I've been following with agonized
fascination for a while).
-David
On Mar 10, 2009, at 12:41 PM, Vince M. Clark wrote:
This blog is arguing that Axis2 doesn't do true RESTful web
services. I'm interested in thoughts and comments from the community.
http://atmanes.blogspot.com/2007/06/how-not-to-do-restful-web-services.html
