Pete Lacey’s Weblog

Maybe posting just before the holiday break wasn’t such a good idea. It meant ignoring some excellent comments for far too long. Mike Champion, in particular, had some interesting things to say, which I’m surfacing in this post and the next.

In my previous post on positioning messaging technologies I stated that one reason to use SOAP/WS was to stay in step with the product direction of certain large vendors such as Microsoft or IBM. Mike, a Microsoft employee, says, “Speaking only for my little corner of Microsoft, I don’t think the company as a whole takes sides [in the REST vs SOAP debate]…” (Read the full comment).

That is good to hear, and I’ve seen Don Box and Dare Obasanjo make similar claims. In fact, I would love to hear that MS has fully embraced both technologies and is not biased towards one or the other, but, to be honest, I’m not convinced.

Yes, Microsoft is a big company working on many different products. And the product teams probably have the leeway to make pragmatic choices, such as supporting REST instead of (or as well as) SOAP. But from the outside looking in, and ignoring what Microsoft is doing with its online properties, all I can see is the Windows Communication Foundation! Its name says it all. The WCF is the preferred mechanism for remote communication. Indeed it is the very foundation of Windows communication. And it is SOAP/WS. Sure, I’m aware that you can create RESTful apps with WCF, and I appreciate that this is even possible, but it’s hardly front and center. For instance, here’s how Microsoft describes the WCF . Now look at the very last paragraph. To me that shows a definite bias.

I want to be proved wrong. I want to be pointed to the web pages that show REST support (and not just HTTP verbs and URIs) in Longhorn Server and Visual Studio and BizTalk and SQL Server. I want to see high-level support for content negotiation and ETags and permanent redirects (as Sam said in his comment on Dare’s post). The fact is, though, that Microsoft has made a huge bet on SOAP web services, even co-authoring nearly every spec that matters. And while the HTTP stack may be accessible through WCF, it hardly seems that REST is part of Microsoft’s-strategic direction.

Not to pick on Microsoft; the same is true for IBM and others. Heck, IBM employs many of the leading proponents of REST: Sam Ruby (or have you moved on, Sam?), James Snell, Mark Pilgrim, Joe Gregorio, and more. Yet, based on IBM’s product releases and sales and marketing efforts, I think it’s safe to sat that they are backing SOAP and SOA all the way. And this is not necessarily a critique either; some very smart people believe that SOAP/SOA is the way of the future, so there’s no reason that companies like MS and IBM shouldn’t place a huge bet there. I don’t believe it will pay off all that handsomely, but there’s no denying there’s a lot of money on the table.

After the new year I’ll address Mike’s other point: “Finally, my suspicion is that if people start thinking hard about REST-like multi-hop or multi-protocol reliability / security / etc., they will end up reinventing something that looks an awful lot like the SOAP stack. I presume you disagree, but why?”