An aside, becusue this post is little more than a quote from Justin Leavesley: but it captures very well my own take on webservices and the SOAP vs. REST debate:
Clayton [in The Innovator's Dilemma] also describes what he terms as "Disruptive Innovation" of which one type is the low-end disruption. This is where a technically inferior innovation radically reduces the barrier(be that skill, cost or location) to entry thereby allowing an audience that was previously excluded to participate. This competes on new dimensions with a new audience.http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/2006/05/web_services_and_the_innovator.phpThis massive new audience is currently excluded from the traditional solution so the disruptive innovation only competes against being better than nothing for this audience.
So disruptive innovation allows a new, less skilled community to participate and do new kinds of things. Almost by definition this community is larger than the community of experts i.e. it is the long tail.
If we consider REST we see that it is not technically as advanced as SOAP based Web Services. But it is significantly easier with lower skill and cost barriers for both producer and consumer. And sure enough Amazon and others are finding that the vast majority of the users of their platform are using the REST APIs.
One question for me is how we reflect this in HE, for example in our teaching about webservices? In business related web services, SOAP, WSDL, and business standard schemas like BPEL and BPMLare presumably the things we should be teaching our students to prepare them for a life in industry (for a good review on web services, see here).
But should this be at the expense of teaching playground hacks with RESTful APIs?
Where does the happy balance lie?
Posted by ajh59 at May 15, 2006 10:22 AM