Markus,
at the moment, I'm much more enthusiastic about REST than SOAP for new protocols (and UWS is not deployed anywhere so it's still new) and particularly in respect of extensions to DAL services and the like. I haven't made any _production_ REST services yet, mind, but there is a simple prototype at http://ag01.ast.cam.ac.uk:8082/UWS-1/ that tries out some of what I wrote in the Note.
I think REST usually wins for services that are (a) public facing and and registered in our kind of registry; (b) client-server. In this case, we've already decided that they have URIs and a calling pattern that HTTP can support. If we had some new kind of service, perhaps a genuine P2P messaging kind of thing, then we might find that SOAP-over-something-other-than-HTTP was better than REST.
If there arose a righteous SOAP toolkit that genuinely made SOAP both easy and flexible, then maybe it would become better than REST in practical terms. This hasn't happened yet.
I wouldn't want to deprecate existing IVOA protocols just because they're based on SOAP. I'm not that much of a convert. :)
Cheers,
Guy
On Mon, 26 Feb 2007, Markus Dolensky wrote:
> Dear Guy,
>
> It's great that you are implementing a REST prototype that one can
> (hopefully) look at.
>
> > My personal preference is to work, from here on, just on the RESTful form of
> > UWS and to abandon the SOAP version. Since, AFAIK, I'm the only one who has
> > writen any SOAP UWS code I think this should be OK. Please let me know your
> > views.
>
> Going one step further, do you recon not to use SOAP at all when writing
> new services? (because it'll be harder to make them behave UWS'ish later on)
>
> Greetings,
> Markus
>
Guy Rixon gtr-at-ast.cam.ac.uk Institute of Astronomy Tel: +44-1223-337542 Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HA Fax: +44-1223-337523Received on 2007-02-26Z18:49:19