In his latest post, Jason Bloomberg asks: “Where is the SOA in REST-based SOA?” and attempts to straighten out any confusion about how the REST protocol fits in service oriented architecture.
In theory, since SOA is an architectural philosophy, it should not depend on any particular standard or protocol.
But, nonetheless, protocols matter as services are built and deployed, and Jason raises three questions that come with building and deploying REST-based services:
- Where is the service abstraction?
- Where is the contract?
- Where is the composition?
REST addresses these three requirements, Jason points out, but on different levels than SOAP Web services. Jason cautions that confusion over SOA, combined with confusion about REST, can be a double-whammy. The good news: “this time, vendors aren’t trying to co-opt REST to sell software the way they did SOA.”
