Friday, February 16, 2007

My take on JSR 311, Java API for RESTful Web Services

I think doing this inside the JAX-WS space seems to give the wrong impression. I heard that they were proposing to tunnel REST services through JAX-WS endpoints. But Dan sent me the following link to a blog post by Marc Hadley which gave me some hope.

Sun always messed it up with Web Services. JAX-RPC and JAX-WS were horribly complicated with no apparent benefit other than to say the implementer is J2EE compliant. What a price to pay to have that check box in your marketing literature. They may very well make the REST API equally useless by tying it to those JAX-WS API's.

Anyways we already have an API for REST in the form of servlets and JSP, but I agree that they weren't good enough. IMHO they should have improved these APIs and add REST support over there, not inside JAX-WS which will fuel the myth, that REST is an alternative to SOAP, instead of REST is an alternative to SOA.

All REST API's I have seen so far, are high level annotation driven API's on top of a HTTP binding (servlets). For example what Dan has in XFire. I strongly believe that REST support should go into an HTTP API (servlets) instead of a WS API
.

No comments: