intertwingly

Jon Udell: It’s also true that, as Sam Ruby has elegantly shown, SOAP can be used in a RESTful way that does not markedly differ from any other kind of XML-over-HTTP scenario w/respect to payload, but that can inject various kinds of enterprisey bits into the header.  From that perspective I suspect that SOAP and RSWS wind up being roughly the same.

Only if you consider the Google maps interface of today and the MapQuest interface that existed at the time Google maps was introduced as being “roughly the same”.  I don’t.  The abstractions and patterns are different.  For example: where’s the toString in SOAP?

Also, please don’t confuse SOAP with WS-*, as this leads to hasty generalizations.

It is quite one thing to point out that REST, as described by Roy’s dissertation, does not prescribe where any given header is to be placed.  It is quite another to point at any one specification and say that it has a proven ability to scale to the enterprise levels and beyond.

In related news, I put some effort into Chapter 10 yesterday, and Leonard did me the favor of rewriting the introduction to this chapter.