Tim Ewald speaks on REST

The Boston architecture study group met tonight to hear from Tim Ewald on the subject of REST. Let me say to start that if you get the opportunity to hear him speak it is worth making the effort. He was passionate, knowledgeable and thought provoking. He talked about why he was so excited about REST.

I have to confess that I am not sure that I completely GET it. There is certainly one part that resonated with me that was why build up all these layers on top of HTTP when we already have lots of interesting capabilities in HTTP.

One part that I am not convinced about is that English prose in the form of documentation is a contract. At some level of detail it might be OK but it doesn't have the ability to reason about in the same way that a WSDL definition does.

He made the very good point that 'in the wild' this is the way things are going. The big web services sites are using REST rather than SOAP.