Bill de hOra wrote:
> I recall Mark Baker and James Strachan talking about paradigms and
> mental gear shifts a few years back when it comes to 'getting' REST. I
> mean seriously, what is there to get? How can an *entire industry* not
> get REST until Q406 or thereabouts? I don't buy it. I think the wheels
> are falling off the WS industry wagon, and SOA will be next. We're
> witnessing one of those once a decade industry re-alignments.

I often think that REST can be difficult for people to understand
because it's so simple.

My experience as someone who was (and still is) mainly a web person was
that REST codified a lot of stuff I'd learned the hard way in much the
same way that when one learns a new software pattern it's often
something one has already used many times, but now it has a name it's
easier to think about.

With that background when I had to make two computers talk to each other
over an HTTP connection I'd come up with something relatively RESTful
without a second thought. To someone with a different background of
overcoming different problems, it could indeed seem very foreign.

The mental block that gets me isn't so much the one over "how does this
work?" but the obstinate belief that the web will never really work
despite all of the evidence to the contrary. I sometimes feel like
Johnson addressing Bishop Berkeley's theory of the non-existence of
matter by kicking a stone and saying "I refute it thus".

Plenty of people on this list had made computers talk to each other over
HTTP and in accordance with HTTP before there was any hype around
"REST", but people still insist that the web doesn't work and we need
rubbish like SOAP to "fix" it, so we need something with an actual name
before they can even dare to belief in it. Similarly, in other aspects
of the web we have "Web2.0" which, as far as I can see, is the radical
notion that the technology we've all been using for over 15 years might
actually work and maybe we should just use it rather than trying to win
the glory of being the person who fixes it.