WS or REST?

Stefan Tilkov has tried to sort the SOA bloggers into three camps: pro-WS, pro-REST, and neutral/ambivalent. He has put me into the WS camp.

I guess that's fair, because I probably spend more time in the world of WS than the world of REST. However, I prefer to leave the technical infrastructure and standards to other people, and concentrate instead on clarifying the business requirements and planning/managing the SOA adoption. I certainly don't have a strong general preference for WS over REST, but there are certainly enterprise situations where WS is going to be strongly preferred.

At the SPARK workshop in March 2006, I proposed a layered diagram (here), which was intended to show how the two camps might interoperate.

Stefan's list has evolved as some people have clarified (or in some cases perhaps muddied) their position. (The original list is replicated by Loek Bakker, for comparison.) The evolution appears to show a shift away from, perhaps even a repudiation of WS-*.

What we really need is a way of abstracting away from the WS/REST debate, and talking about (web) services without presuming one or other standard.

Technorati Tags: REST SOA SPARK06 service-oriented WS-*