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HOME >> COLUMNS

Give It a REST

By Larry O'Brien

January 15, 2007 — (Page 1 of 2)
I’ve decided to stop being polite about the WS-* stack. I shipped my first XML-over-HTTP solution more than seven years ago. SOAP didn’t exist, so we just used servlets to parse requests and respond appropriately, a technique that today is called “Plain Old XML” (POX). We did lots of things that, in later years, would be considered wrong—we didn’t use namespaces, we didn’t fret a great deal about validation, we constructed our XML using string-processing commands—and, of course, there were pain points in what we developed. Yet we shipped.

In 2000, I first heard the refrain that’s become so familiar since: The coming wave of vendor-provided tools would simultaneously simplify development and enable new scenarios. Simplify? Constructing and parsing XML documents was even then about as hard as falling off a log, but anything can be made easier. The new scenarios envisioned in the year 2000 centered around guarantees: delivery, execution (via transactions) and privacy (via encryption). Quicker than you can say “https,” these were then bundled together into a “distributed trusted trading partner supply-chain.” In the face of such an important-sounding thing, I began my sorry history of capitulation. POX worked well for me and Roy Fielding’s thesis (roy.gbiv.com/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm) seemed eminently logical, but, geez, if you’re trying to program a supply-chain with distributed trusted trading partners, then maybe WS-* has its advantages.

Every year since then, it’s gone the same way: I worked on systems and, invariably, those that used POX and REST had very little pain about tooling and debugging. Those that used WS-* protocols generally went fine—as long as everyone used the same tool set. If they used .NET exclusively, great. If they used Axis exclusively, great. If they used Random Programming Language exclusively, great. But what about when worlds collide? When you try to point a Java-based tool at a .NET-generated WSDL file or vice versa? Trouble.

I’ve advocated REST and POX in this column over the years, but never at the expense of WS-*, for which I always gave a “to be sure, complex scenarios may call…” deferral. No more. The final straw came when I found myself tracing a

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