Tuesday, March 21, 2006

HTTP, XML, REST, and $100

In response to: Don Box's Spoutlet: HTTP, XML, REST, and $100 I’d target event driven architecture & or pub/sub using HTTP,XML,REST. Not sure how good Microsoft MQ is these days , but last time I checked it was pretty weak in the pub/sub area compared to good JMS impls. This has been my biggest hang up with the state of the art of web services. I think that currently, you really can’t build an event driven architecture with web services. And most of the WS-* specs have an extreme P2P bias which in a large integration will just collapse like it always has (pointed haired n(n-1) problem). Yeah there is WS-Notification, but are there really any decent impls? Do the interoperate? I don’t want all that cruft in my events anyway. Not sure if you are already have something like this I have been away from Microsoft projects for some time. I have a hard time believing that event driven architecture can even work over HTTP (yeah you could have a service or too that work that way, but I wouldn’t bet my business on all of them working that way). My general background … I am a B player Microsoft developer (at best). I am conversant in .NET because I went to a training at Microsoft for a week and I did a couple C# projects with web services and messaging. My experience with WS-* was very unpleasant. I worked with CORBA, DCOM, and RMI before that and they were almost easier to make interoperate. I am a little dated though. I gave up on web services in late 2003 and haven’t really looked back. I do follow the arguments though and find myself in the Lo-Rest/POX corner. I make my living integrating large financial systems in an event driven architecture/Lo-Rest that is Java based. I read most of some write up on Indigo on a plane a couple weeks ago. Like I was with .NET, I was impressed. I said to myself, “This is about as good as anyone is going to make WS-* -- it is a pity that WS-* is so fatally flawed that it doesn’t really matter.” I was confronted though knowing that Microsoft would salvage something from it ;)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Incidentally, there's an open source JMS (Apache ActiveMQ) which supports a REST and Ajax API to its pub/sub and queue based messaging network...

http://activemq.org/Ajax

also using ActiveMQ and ServiceMix we can implement WS-Notification too...
http://servicemix.org/WS+Notification

in both cases the bridge to WS-* and REST are fine; though there are more optimal approaches, like a pure C# client to ActiveMQ...

http://activemq.org/OpenWire+dotNet