Very helpful, thank you. As you may have noticed from recent threads we have been working with Axis. To date we have only used SOAP. Our client just informed us that they want to standardize on REST, which seems easy enough to do with Axis. As we started down this path we came across the blog post I referenced claiming "How NOT to do RESTful web services" which raised some concerns.
Interesting that you mentioned OAGIS, as our client also stated that they want to standardize on this for transporting documents across systems. So I guess the question is, what is our best path? Continue with Axis, or make/fund/wait for changes to the OFBiz service engine. Either way I intend to leverage what has already been established in the OAGIS component. ----- Original Message ----- From: "David E Jones" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 2:27:44 PM (GMT-0600) America/Chicago Subject: Re: restful web services 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
