Home page of John McDowall
I have not had time to read them all but ( I intend to) Carlos Perez has a great series of articles on REST - Manageability - Brainstorming a ReSTful Toolkit. If the REstful toolkit can be understood in less than a day it could be a winner.
I took the liberty of expanding on the title of this article It Ain't Easy to be Simple by Mike Champion. The article surprised me it was on the front page of MSDN yesterday indicating that the REST - WS debate is moving into the center of attention.
I am not sure I would argue that HTTP/REST is elegant, but rather it is a good approach to working with what we have. Many years ago circa 1997 someone said to me that HTTP is the last protocol that will be invented - the comment stuck but it was not till many years later that I realized the truth of it. Essentially the weight of the installed base of plumbing we have installed at both desktop and server virtually requires that HTTP exists everywhere for at least the next few decades. I think XML is moving into the same position as a data representation language. Therefore it is only natural that they come together to communicate meaning in machine-machine and machine-human conversations. These essence of the debate is do we take a minimalist approach to defining the conversation (REST) or do we take the solve every problem approach which is the WS-*&%$# approach?
In this article in Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog he cites that corporate IT Architects and developers are getting worried about the erosion of simple in web services.
One reaction to this is to build complex development environments that mask the complexity and make it appear simple, but this is usually the wrong approach as good architects and developers need to understand their tools and how they work. I have never been able to make a poor developer become a great developer by giving them a tool - it takes training, monitoring and patience.
Web Services (and by web services I use the broad meaning - services that communication over the web) are important and are not going away, so we do need to solve the problem. More and more companies are moving to shared infrastructure and shared services and they need to be able to communicate, simply, transparently, reliably and securely. Simply often means solving only 80% of the problem and just getting something working in the real world, the WS-x!*&@ stack tries to solve 100% of the problem before the real world has defined the problem. Time will tell what the outcome will be, but my bet is on simple to win
Over the last several months we have been hiring in several areas. So far the best service has been CraigsList in terms of quality of applicants. However I have just started using Linkedin's new service and it is starting to show what a social network can do. The user interface is dramatically easier than CraigsList (which has completely awful search capabilities - try searching for C# or .Net) and makes use of your social network to get well matched clients.
Is it perfect - no it has a long way to go but it is the first feature in a social network that does something unique to social networking and makes business sense. To early to tell yet if the quality of applicants matches CraigsList but Linkedin has the right demographic for our type of business, technically sophisticated, early adopters and willing to push the envelope. So I imagine that it should evolve into a very good service if they can keep the signal to noise ratio low - I notice a lot of recruiters in there already. While recruiters are a necessary part of our business they are an intermediary that might not work in a social network the same way the work today. It is an area Linkedin should think about to keep the service useful.