It had to happen sooner or later. The big boys are waking up and
discovering REST, and naturally they want to protect all us little
developers from worrying our pretty little heads about nasty things like
HTTP and XML by creating easy-to-use REST frameworks:

JSR-311 Java API for RESTful Web Services
http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=311

Remember, these are the same jokers who gave us servlets and the
URLConnection class as well as gems like JAX-RPC and JAX-WS. They still
seem to believe that these are actually good specs, and they are
proposing to tunnel REST services through JAX-WS (Java API for XML Web
Services) endpoints.

They also seem to believe that "building RESTful Web services using the
Java Platform is significantly more complex than building SOAP-based
services". I don't know that this is false, but if it's true it's only
because Sun's HTTP API were designed by architecture astronauts who
didn't actually understand HTTP. This proposal does not seem to be
addressing the need for a decent HTTP API on either the client or server
side that actually follows RESTful principles instead of fighting
against them.

To give you an idea of the background we're dealing with here, one of
the two people who wrote the proposal "represents Sun on the W3C XML
Protocol and W3C WS-Addressing working groups where he is co-editor of
the SOAP 1.2 and WS-Addressing 1.0 specifications. Marc was
co-specification lead for JAX-WS 2.0 (the Java API for Web Services)
developed at the JCP and has also served as Sun's technical lead and
alternate board member at the Web Services Interoperability Organization
(WS-I)."

The other submitter seems to be a primary instigator of the Fast Infoset
effort to hide XML in binary goop.

This is like asking Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to write the Democratic
Party platform.

Do we really want to trust these folks to define the official Java spec
for REST? Please read the JSR, and send comments to jsr-311-comments@...

I hope we can derail this completely, but we probably can't. If not, are
there any JSR members here who might join the working group and bring
some sanity and actual REST experience to the development of the
eventual specification? If we can't stop it, maybe we can at least limit
the damage.


--
Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@...
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/