> Because for any given service it's quite likely to find consumes who
> will appreciate one and not the other, and adding a checklist is
> easier than taking a stand.
We've seen this behavior before with competing, proprietary technology
stacks and distributed-object approaches. A vendor was much more
likely to get an "enterprise" sale if they supported a whole slew of
acronyms. Quality tends to suffer, though, when products try to
please everyone. Components and systems ended up being either
mediocre all around or supporting one stack/language/protocol well and
the others horribly.
It appears, in this case, that Amazon started with a SOAP API and
attempted to bolt on a "RESTful" (even with quotation marks, I'm being
generous) one with minimal additional code. I think this is a large
miscalculation on Amazon's part, because:
a) Most of the people that are excited about the services they are
rolling out are comfortable with REST in both philosophy and
implementation.
b) The only customers that would demand a SOAP interface are
"enterprises" (there are those quotes again) that aren't looking to
externalize their infrastructure to Amazon.
I could be completely missing the mark. As a SOAP victim, I still
bear the scars of former and present run-ins with WS-*. Is anyone
seeing a high level of enthusiasm for Big Web Services that I'm just
missing?
... Amazon does the same thing with their ecommerce api, which this list has criticized long ago. Not that it did any good...I just checked, the latest...
Bob Haugen
bob.haugen@...
Dec 15, 2007 11:15 pm
This is a variant of what I call as SOAPy REST (http://subbu.org/weblogs/main/2007/10/soapy_rest.html ). Whoever wrote this API had no idea of why they were...
... I nominate it for the 2007 Restless awards, in the much contested category of "things that claim to be RESTful but do side effects in their GETs" along...
+1 I just tried to "refactor" this API (http://www.subbu.org/weblogs/main/2007/12/a_restful_versi.html ) to be resource oriented, and it is not that hard. ...
which only proves that doing good REST is as easy as bad REST. The trouble is that the "action-oriented" mindset maps very well into SOAP and not REST. This...
... And the resource mindset maps poorly to SOAP :-) ... Because for any given service it's quite likely to find consumes who will appreciate one and not the...
... We've seen this behavior before with competing, proprietary technology stacks and distributed-object approaches. A vendor was much more likely to get an...
... Yes. The same application I was talking about a couple days ago. There's also a (very limited) SOAP API. It went down something like this: * bizdev: hey,...
... Amazon did well in: == The 2006 'What Now How' Awards for REST Protocols* == with their S3 interface. Shame they've lost their touch and gone STREST**....
Here is another nominee for your 2007 Restless awards. Plaxo.com have their REST reference guide here [1]. I included a few samples, just to whet your...
The good thing is that all these companies are trying to open up their systems with public APIs. However, the REST-branding is unfortunate. It is not just the...
(completing the rant) The good thing is that all these companies are trying to open up their systems with public APIs. However, the REST-branding is...
Has anyone voiced their concerns and suggestions on the Amazon Web Services forums? I spoke with a few of their engineers and project leaders. They are smart...
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