Thinking Like Tim

I talk to Tim on a regular basis. So when he outed himself as a REST convert lately, it actually wasn't a huge surprise to me - we've been talking a lot lately about what the last few years have taught us about web service programming, and how more and more SOAP/WS-* just doesn't seem to be all that and a bag of chips. Still, the key part of the analysis in his latest post - that you can use HTTP as a way to publish application states and the transitions between them - really struck me as something significant, and brought a lot more clarity to the whole problem.

 

Here's where my thinking is at: Basically every SOAP web service I've written in the last four years could have been done just as well as a straight HTTP interface. And a several of them would have been significantly better. The ones that couldn't are very clearly RPC style, for better or for worse. I've been feeling this especially acutely lately as I try to optimize one of the services I've written. I found myself implementing HTTP over SOAP, which just seems stupid, not to mention clumsy.

 

For me it's really not about whether the thing is "REST" or not. I find the term REST to be too laden to be useful. I think more in terms of "SOAP via toolkits" (SVT?) versus Plain Old XML over HTTP (POX). After all, I'm perfectly willing to use a SOAP Envelope as long as I still get to use HTTP GET. But at the end of the day, ignoring particular terminology, I agree with Tim's analysis: SVT is for stuff I'd use DCOM for in the old days, not for putting up a large-scale, public-facing, web-based, programmatic interfaces.

 

I realize that programmers love their tools and toolkits, but honestly, when you build big giant systems sometimes you have to do things the "hard" way. It always surprises me when my clients complain that complex problems contain complexity in the solution. But in any case, I'm not even convinced that throwing away toolkits like WCF will raise the complexity level - there's a lot to be said for being closer to the wire. Plus, things like Linq for XML look really tasty when you consider how they might help with this style of programming.

 

I do really like the analysis of REST as Representational State *Transition*, as opposed to the T being for "Transfer". To me, viewing the design exercise as figuring out how to expose a connected state graph (i.e.

both transitions and states are explicit) brings a lot of mental order to what I already knew I wanted to do anyway. In particular, it helped me understand how a POX interface is useful for writes...because for reads it's dead obvious: GET kicks ass, especially if you care at all about performance. For a long time I was hung up on trying to figure out how to use SVT on write, and GET on read, because that seemed to make the most sense. But if the thing is just your application state where each state has an address, it's pretty obvious that it's okay to POST to a URL to cause a state transition. Or even for that state transition to significantly alter the URL space.

 

Of course, I have yet to build a large, real system using this new approach. I'd love to, though, because more and more it seems like the right thing. And no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy - witness SVT. The big question is whether the big concepts will prove out for me personally. Hence my eagerness to put my customers' money where my mouth is :).

 

And before you point it out in the comments, I should say that I'm aware of the efforts to make WCF more amenable to straight HTTP-style programming. It's just that I'm dubious about the viability of exposing transport semantics explicitly via an API that's all about abstracting transport semantics. It seems to me that if you're going to remove a layer of abstraction, you should actually remove a layer of abstraction. But again, I'll need to build something real with it before I can draw any supportable conclusions.