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Guest View: How Much REST Do We Need?

By Sanjiva Weerawarana

January 1, 2008 — (Page 1 of 4)
Long live WS-*! WS-* is dead! REST is great! May it rest in peace!

Which one is it? WS-* or REST? It turns out that both camps are lying through their teeth about how "easy" it is to build distributed business applications using their favorite technological approach.

In fact, there is no easy way to build distributed applications; it's simply a hard problem. WS-* and REST (Representational State Transfer) each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Knowing the realities of these different approaches for building distributed systems is critical for being able to make the right choices (and hence sleep restfully on a starry night).

Once you cut through the cloud of hype, it becomes much easier for the confused enterprise architect to understand what to use and when. So let’s take apart the WS-* versus REST debate and clearly separate the facts from the myths and the lies:

WS-* Camp: You need WS-* to build Web services.

Reality: Not true. There are a great many services that do not need WS-*. As long as your requirements are satisfied by the security offered by HTTPS and HTTP Basic Authentication, and you don't need message reliability or transactions, just using REST is the right answer.

To look at this at a lower level, if you're using SOAP to communicate and don't have any headers, then SOAP is not adding any value over a simple XML-over-HTTP approach. Switch to REST instead.

REST Camp: You can build any Web service you need with REST.

Reality: Theoretically you could, but that's not the right practical answer. While there are many services that do not need rigorous security and reliability at the message exchange level, there are also a great number that most certainly do. For example, if you're dealing with medical records, end-to-end security and reliability are absolutely essential.

In that case, you do need the WS-* protocols over HTTP; WS-* is essentially a set of standard, interoperable protocols to achieve these qualities of interaction over any underlying protocol, including HTTP.

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