Alex Barnett blog

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REST / ROA / Astoria / SOA

Jon Udell, rightly so, is getting excited about the new book RESTful Web Services, by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby - a book I myself got excited about in November (REST Web Services and ROA) when I wrote at the time:

"My bet is that this project, the book and the concept of ROA as an effort to standardize aspects of RESTful architecture design is going to do very well, because I agree this is needed. Example provided:

  • ""REST" is an abused term. Many alleged REST services (such as Flickr's, which says REST right on the website) are actually HTTP+POX: service-oriented APIs that happen to use nothing more the basic technologies of the web. Classifying services as resource-oriented or service-oriented makes it easy to see which ones are more and which less RESTful, without wasting time on minutiae."" 

(more links to reviews here)

I don't know if John, Leonard or Sam have spent any time to look at the Astoria project (think - RESTful data services) - see links here, but would love to know what they think - in particular regarding the query syntax (good? bad? too complex? too simple?) and where it sits on the ROA (WOA?) to SOA continuum (WOA links) they discussed.

Posted: May 24 2007, 04:46 PM by alexbarnett | with 6 comment(s)
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Comments

Avi Flax said:

I just finished the book, reading it cover-to-cover within 36 hours. It's excellent - concise, clear, comprehensive, with a great mix of practical information and theory, and an impressively even depth. I've been developing RESTful APIs for over 18 months, and I see the release of this book as a major milestone in the raucous development of RESTful service design.

I'm also interested in Astoria. This is the first I've heard of it - I'm not a .Net user. But we do have a growing contingent of proponents at my company. Thing is, we've preferred to design our service APIs RESTfully, but the .Net guys haven't seemed comfortable with it; they've tended to be more comfortable with SOAP. So Astoria looks like it might be helpful in getting those .Net devs to develop RESTful APIs.

# May 24, 2007 8:19 PM

TrackBack said:

# May 25, 2007 7:00 AM

TrackBack said:

http://crummy.com/2007/06/01/1

Here is some free consulting for Microsoft, based entirely on my readings of white papers ("overview" and "using")...

# June 1, 2007 11:12 PM

Alex Barnett blog said:

Here's something I've been looking forward to for a while - Jon Udell interviewing Pablo Castro on the

# July 3, 2007 3:23 PM

Alex Barnett blog said:

Back in April, the Data Programmability team at Microsoft announced "Astoria": Data Services for the

# August 3, 2007 8:25 PM