Web Services

A few years ago when "web services" were starting to get talked about I read Web Services Essentials which covers XML-RPC, SOAP, UDI, and WSDL. I ended up writing a simple XmlRpc implementation for Suneido and we use it to distribute a particular service for our vertical application.

More recently I just finished reading RESTful Web Services (recommended). I realize now, that for our application there was no reason to use XmlRpc, that a simple RESTful web service (i.e. just using GET and POST) would have worked just as well and been much simpler. On the positive side, at least I didn't try to implement SOAP, UDI, and WSDL!

REST stands for Representational State Transfer which doesn't tell you a whole lot. Basically it is a resource oriented style using basic HTTP GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE.

It seems strange that Web Services Essentials didn't even mention the option of a REST style web service. It's only recently that REST has gained popularity, but you'd think they'd at least mention that you can just use GET and POST. Maybe they assumed that you already knew about that option, but it was all new to me at the time so I assumed the book covered the options.

Of course, if you want to communicate with an existing service you have to use whatever they supply (e.g. SOAP). But for our application we were controlled both the server and the client so we were free to use whatever we wanted.

David Heinemeier Hansson, the originator of the Rails framework for Ruby, is a fan of REST and the latest version of Rails has support for this style.

After reading RESTful Web Services I've been working on improving Suneido's HttpServer to make it easier to implement REST services. We need a new service for our application and it seems like a good opportunity to try a different style.