You got your REST in my SOA

There’s a great article by Steve Vinoski in the Jan/Feb 2007 Internet Computing on the difference(s) between SOA and REST as architectural concepts and approaches titled “REST Eye for the SOA Guy.”
In the intro, he writes:

I’m torn in the Representational State Transfer (REST) and SOA debate — REST is extremely appealing, but my technical background is firmly rooted in the SOA camp. I’m torn in the Representational State Transfer (REST) and SOA debate — REST is extremely appealing, but my technical background is firmly rooted in the SOA camp.

In the end he comes out more on the side of “extremely appealing” than “firmly rooted.” Obviously there’s room for both, but REST comes off as much more attractive than SOA, at least in his version of the story.

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What is it you do, again?

I’m often asked to give a brief definition of Next Generation Internet, since it is in my job title. Unfortunately, that can be a bit challenging, because it’s really a combination of a number of different fundamental changes all occuring in parallel:

• The architecture of participation, and the increased user expectations it is driving,
• The rich interfaces provided by Ajax and related technologies,
• The composition of applications from services, whether as full-blown SOA or simple Mashup

These three major trends fit together very well with Optaros’ overall mission of helping enterprises  meet business needs by leveraging open source software and an assembly-based methodology.

Recently a few very good presentations / articles have appeared that should help make this easier for me to explain and for all of us to understand.

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How do I gouge thee? Let me count the ways . . .

(Yes, I’m still catching up on my reading - I find I can get through about 15 magazines in a 2hr flight just skimming and pulling out what looks worthwhile).

There’s a nicely provocative one-pager in the December Dr. Dobb’s Journal: “Five Ways Vendors Gouge Customers on Integration.”

In it, Ross Mason (from the Mule project) argues that “Despite vendors’ friendly talk about their approaches to SOA, ESBs, and integration in general, their practices are often predatory . . . Vendors have been sticking it to enterprise cusomers for a long time.”

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