Just when some people thought the debate had reached an impas or was over, Ganesh Prasad has tried to add fuel to the discussion by suggesting that there is something more fundamental (and better) than REST. As he says, the debate has been going round in circles for a while:Though I like REST and consider it a very elegant model for SOA, it's a little tiresome to hear day in and day out that it's so much more elegant than the SOAP-based Web Services model. In fact, I'm getting so tired of this shrill posturing that I'm going to stick it to the RESTafarians right now, in their own style.
He then outlines some of the core principles that RESTafarians use to backup their arguments:REST exploits the features of that most scalable application there is - the web, right? REST doesn't fight the features of the web, it works with them, right? HTTP is not just a transport protocol, it's an application protocol, right? URIs are the most natural way to identify resources, HTTP's standard verbs are the most natural way to expose what can be done with resources, and hyperlinks are the most natural way to tie all these together to expose the whole system as a State Machine, right??
