After my last post, I wandered over to Brian Noyes' blog and read some of his comments from earlier this year on the short term forecast for .NET. He had some interesting comments overall, but what stuck out in my mind was his comments on the use of REST over SOAP and how the hype of REST will lead to people making the wrong choice. As with most emerging technologies we must avoid hype from influencing our decisions. In my view, REST is the better choice than SOAP in some situations, and not the best choice in others. So how does one make that decision? Read Brian's comments below for that answer:
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http://www.softinsight.com/bnoyes/2009/01/02/NETTechnicalForecast2009.aspx
(Regarding REST): Unfortunately, I predict that more people will end up using that model instead of SOAP-based messages than probably should, just because it has the hype right now. REST makes a lot of sense for externally exposed, resource-oriented services to put a minimum bar for consumption of data out there. For secure, reliable enterprise services though, you need the additional protocols that the WS-* stack gives you. Consumption of a SOAP based service is also still far easier due to simple code generation of the proxy. So internal services should still be using SOAP in my opinion, but REST makes perfect sense for public exposure of data, whether read only or read-write.
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I hope that clears things up for everyone. I asked this same question last year at a Lakeland User Group meeting and I regret that we didn't discuss the topic more than we did. People probably walked away thinking "REST replaces SOAP", unfortunately. The next question I have is how do we make REST more secure? So let me solicit your comments. What factors would you consider when choosing between using REST or SOAP?
When searching for the answer, I found this little bit of humor. They have more humor on their website so you must check it out.
http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007/06/the_consultants.html
