What is striking about the WS-Empire striking back (borrowing from Mark’s post) is not the attempt to "standardize" certain new features for SOAP messages, but the apparent lack (or break-down) of a cohesive guiding principle for architecting SOAP-based web services. I’m referring to WS-ResourceTransfer here.
Let me get to the basics. According to SOAP 1.2,
SOAP Version 1.2 is a lightweight protocol intended for exchanging structured information in a decentralized, distributed environment. … using XML technologies, an extensible messaging framework containing a message construct that can be exchanged over a variety of underlying protocols.
If I buy into this model, I would take it that the message describes everything – the operation/verb, the data, and any additional instructions to process the data.
But if we look at WS-ResourceTransfer, it says that
it intends to form an essential core component of a unified resource access protocol for the Web services space…
and then goes on to define a standardized technique for accessing resources using semantics familiar to those in the system management domain: get, put, create and delete.
What? One of the strongest arguments in the REST vs WS-* debate so far has been that a uniform interface (as in REST) is not adequate to describe the varieties of operations that enterprises need to do (with WS-*). But then why attempt to define a uniform interface familiar to those in the system management domain when the WS-* side concluded that uniform interfaces don’t meet the needs? Looks like a resource access spin.
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