"are busy writing layers of complex specifications for doing this stuff in a different way that isn’t nearly as useful or eloquent"
What is that supposed to mean. HTTP is such a simple protocol that people need to invent technologies atop it because on its own it can't do much. lack of state, for example, so people came up with cookies and sessions and so on. These were necessary and an integral part of the web's evolution from the days back in the early 90's when people had 'home pages' of pictures of their cat.
I personally found the article badly written, overly long and full of passive aggressive attacks at what the web has become.
For me when I first encountered this particular post on REST a couple of years ago it was like an ah ha moment. SOAP is just one complex layer. Struts is another, actually a container in a container. Having messed around in J2ee land for while this article made me realize that most folks didn't know or didn't care what a stock J2ee container could do if one started thinking RESTfully.
Then we built a whole enterprise web application using just a stock J2ee container and RESTful style thinking. How much simpler! No extra frameworks to learn. The UI became completely decoupled from the services. The services are completely decoupled from the J2ee container, naturally. All the container does is resolve the nouns to a service name and give a call back to the appropriate verb method, doGet, doPut, doDelete.
In fairness we are not 100% RESTful there is some legacy stuff that relies on the session. However having done a few SOAP/WSDL services and tons of Struts actions or Spring "injections" I must say that REST is in my opinion a much cleaner way to code for web apps. Whenever I hear about some implementation needing a SOAP/WSDL service I run the other way as fast as possible. I won't even debate folks about it anymore, I just refuse to work on all that complexity.
As an aside I have seen here and there some frameworks the purport to use REST. I don't really get this. Why would somebody need and additional framework to make something RESTful? I have done it with J2ee and just plain Apache. I believe the web itself to be the framework, I could be way off in my thinking though, it wouldn't be the first time. Anybody have any clues about what a RESTful framework is for?
Mostly a "RESTful framework" just allows you to easily map verb/noun combinations to functions. You create a noun (an object) with the standard verbs as methods, and it does the other stuff. Pretty basic, but it makes life easier.
What is that supposed to mean. HTTP is such a simple protocol that people need to invent technologies atop it because on its own it can't do much. lack of state, for example, so people came up with cookies and sessions and so on. These were necessary and an integral part of the web's evolution from the days back in the early 90's when people had 'home pages' of pictures of their cat.
I personally found the article badly written, overly long and full of passive aggressive attacks at what the web has become.