Respresentational State

I was just reading a page on RESTWiki about HowSoapComparesToRest. Despite the title, about half the page is devoted to a discussion of what the State in REpresentational State Transfer is.

Reading through that discussion and seeing people trying to get a handle on what resource's state is transferred when you do a POST to certain kinds of resources or the fact that you might transfer the state of a resource that has no name, I suddenly had the thought that its not so important to know what state is -- its what it's not that's important. In fact, its really not so much about the state at all -- its about the representation. In a RESTful system, (in a very general sense) you dont move objects (resources) around, you move facsimiles (representations) of those objects (resources) around.

Why is this important? I'm not sure I know at this point. I just know that after several years of thinking and reading about REST, this is the first time I've thought about it this way.

REST v WS-*: Compare and contrast

I've been spending a lot of time looking for information that compares and/or contrasts WS-* with REST. As I go, I've been accumulating links here and there, saving them in various places (bookmarks in my browser, on the desktop, and at bloglines), but this weekend, I decided that it was about time I got with the program and availed myself of the services offered at del.icio.us. Once I'd gotten an account set up and had moved over all my bookmarks I had lying around in varoius places, I spent a good deal of time Sunday perusing a few email threads over on the ws-arch mail archives and a few more over in the xml-dev archives.

As I find things that appear to be of the REST vs. WS-* ilk, I'll add them to the restvsoap tag that I set up on del.icio.us. I'm hoping that at least a few other people notice the tag and are able to add some useful pointers as well. I'll try to limit myself to using the restvsoap tag only for things that have useful comparisons rather than just being flame-fests; hopefully others will do the same.