Sound Bite for Rest/non-object serialization web services

Jonathan Altman — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 02:17:00 +0000

I have posted several times about it, made a bunch of different arguments, and anybody who has talked to me about web services has heard me try and make the argument not to force a web service to be the serialized transfer of object artifacts. But here’s the summary in a nice single sentence from the post CommonRESTquestions:

REST can be seen a documented-oriented subset of Object-Orientation. It deliberately reduces the expressiveness of Objects down to the capabilities of resources to ensure compatability and interoperability between components of the architecture.

The rest of that paragraph goes on to say

Object-Orientation allows too great a scope of variation for internet-scale software systems such as the world-wide-web to develop, and doesn’t evolve well as demands on the feature set change. REST is Object-Orientation that works between agencies, between opposing interests. For that you need to make compromises rather than doing things your own way.

So there you go, someone said in a paragraph exactly what it has taken me 2 years to try and say.

Jonathan's Pancheria: Sound Bite for Rest/non-object serialization web services

Sound Bite for Rest/non-object serialization web services