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October 17, 2006

One thing

Filed under: architecture,webarch,webservices — Mark Baker @ 10:09 am

I’ve been doing a lot of writing recently (most of it yet to be published) on a specific topic that I first wrote about here a while back. The topic is important because it’s the answer to a question I was asked (offline) a few weeks ago;

In your opinion, what is the one thing that most clearly separates REST from SOA?

The answer I gave was… generality.

If you ignore identifiers, hypermedia, and all those other Webby things, and just look at REST and SOA as two architectural styles, the main difference is that REST internalizes the best practice that generalized interfaces are better (in the general case of document oriented distributed systems). That’s really 90% (to pick a large number out of the air) of the difference. If you’ve come from an RPC or OO-RPC background (CORBA, DCE, DCOM, RMI, Web services, etc..), and understand that, then you understand the Web. And if you don’t, you don’t.

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1 Comment »

  1. One More Thing

    I don’t disagree with what Mark is saying about interface generality, but I do disagree that REST and SOA can be compared like that, since a SOA can be REST-based….

    Trackback by Middleware Matters — October 20, 2006 @ 12:16 am

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