Addressing Doubts about REST
Thinking about REST or need to address some lingering concerns about adopting REST? I found the article Addressing Doubts about REST full of pragmatic, down to earth answers and advice for comparing REST and WS-* (or, RPC).
Nothing new, but a solid collection of answers to how you should think about REST and how you should apply it to your system.
I especially appreciated how the author points out that if you are worried about transactions across your systems, that's probably a design smell and you want to re-think your approach. Never expect that transactions will work reliably across many systems. Instead, build in logic to recover from error states. This is not a REST issue, but instead a large system design issue. REST simply makes it easy to pass the state of your resources between systems.
Nothing new, but a solid collection of answers to how you should think about REST and how you should apply it to your system.
I especially appreciated how the author points out that if you are worried about transactions across your systems, that's probably a design smell and you want to re-think your approach. Never expect that transactions will work reliably across many systems. Instead, build in logic to recover from error states. This is not a REST issue, but instead a large system design issue. REST simply makes it easy to pass the state of your resources between systems.