Premature Conclusions with Services and REST

Damn, I wish we were at a white board. Oh well.

JJ, you've drawn a lot of conclusions from talking with a few people in the REST community. I think you've gotten ahead of yourself.

To defend the "REST community": What we are talking about isn't where most of the value is. Not yet anyway. Maybe someday this issue will really be an issue, but right now just GETing info with declarative representation data is so unusual that we're on the fringe.

Really, I believe this on the internet at large and in many organizations as well (enterprisey doesn't even get funny when sharing a database is so common.) . How much value does a definition language really have? Well, some. Just like I appreciate static languages for documentation and _some_ checking, having a WSDL or something is useful. None of the things being thrown around for "interface definition language" are much more useful than being able to organize documentation, generate code (a bad idea), and create pictures (sometimes useful for humans). That last point, the human part, is where you started this conversation... Let's not pretend that WSDL allows machines to process things for us.

To your recent post. I don't have much time tonight, but hear is my reaction.

Shared Understanding.
This isn't actually denied by the REST. It's just relegated to the media type.

The "contract" that is specific to a particular domain in a RESTful system is buried in the Representation. That means a) we all collectively don't know much about it, b) every system can use the standard VERBS to explore and partially integrate. The first point means we need to have this very conversation, but the value of that struggle is more common ground between all services.

Result Sets aren't Resources
Huh? Why not? I'll need to read up on the posts, but everything interesting is a resource. I don't understand why you conclude this.

Some of your recent posts have indicated what I think may be a confusion regarding the "uniform interface" and resources. Not every resource must support and expose each method. Part of the discovery of REST is learning (at runtime) what methods are available for each resources. Results sets don't need to expose PUT.

How many people are in this discussion?
Not many, I'm afraid. You're assuming that people won't discuss these issues with you, but it's probably that it doesn't matter to most of the RESTful systems out there.

As an example: the Amazon service exposed this weekend. It is people (not machine processes) that are writing the wrapper layers around the new API. It almost doesn't matter what they had exposed it in, people need to spend thought understanding it and wrapping it. Then, other people, need to consume the wrappers to write applications.

Had Amazon used some magically fantastic definition language it wouldn't change but a part of the total human/computer processing cost and value proposition. Again, I think there is value in understanding and exposing that fantastic definition language. I'm not assuming it will magically compose my systems. (I'm not necessarily claiming you make that declaration either, but the value you place on the formality seems too strong. I will read your book on composition to really understand what you are saying.)

REST and actions
There is something critically important about the distinction between "action interfaces" and "document exchange". You took Subbu to task for trying to remove actions, but I think there is a truly subtle reason that REST motivates that thinking.

I'm not sure I can express it well, but this is my intuitive view:

• contract negotiation is an (endless?) cycle of document exchange
• reserving a _good_ hotel room is an cycle of question/answer...
  
• bartering is a cycle of bid exchange
• resolving a speeding ticket is ...
  

what these real ways of getting things done tell me is that an interface contract doesn't model the real world.

REST models "action" as one or more transfer of document representation. That is more like the world than interface actions.

REST and versioning.
Really bad at versioning? Seriously? If you'd said "efficiency", or "tool support", or "machine clients" I'd be right there saying "Yeah, maybe this would improve that..."

Versioning is hard because something wants to change - and the rest of the system isn't yet ready to change as well. REST has from the beginning been about supporting that change (across organizations, and between the client and server). The very reason that interface definition languages are so hard to reconcile with REST is because of the radically different view on how to support evolution.

(I'm posting this without all the links...)

Shared Understanding and/or Evolvability

(This is belated and too short. All you fast-typing bloggers out there can just be patient :) Sorry for the delay!)

How do distributed systems both cooperate and evolve?

That is a subtly different question than JJ asks:

when no human is in the loop, you need a shared understanding between the resource consumer and the resource (provider)

The only viable choices JJ then describes (WSDL or WADL) do indeed provide a partial solution to coding shared understanding, but not evolution.

The short (flip?) answer to my leading question is to create a new media type that describes the semantics necessary for both consumers and providers to communicate.

In the case of exposing a Job Application Service as a RESTful provider that could mean the following:

• for a human provide an HTML response representation with forms for review, cancel, submit interview.
• for a machine provide an XML or RDF (or something) response representation.

That machine representation must have a lot of things going for it. It must provide just enough shared information to do useful things, but not prevent service evolution. In particular, the response must:

• provide links/conformance to some shared schema type(s) (to share semantics)
• be extensible (in the "does not understand" sense)
• the shared schema can't pre-define URIs
• the shared schema can't pre-constrain all of the transition paths
  

That last one is really fuzzy, but I'm trying to express the idea with my "signposts" metaphor. Getting something done (i.e. changing the state of something) isn't alway a single step, and how many steps have to be followed isn't a very stable property. In the case of job applications, getting from "offered" to "accepted" might take a few loops in the 1.1 release of the service, or maybe the "review" state gets split into 2 steps, what happens then?

The current conception of "shared understanding" is "shared interface". In the Job Application example that means the client service is encoded to expect after "Submit Review" that the service moved the job app to "reviewed". If the client service instead was coded to have a pair of (current job app data, desired state) when the service changed to a 2-stage review process the clients would likely continue to work:

• Client: Get job app 123
• Service: job app 123, submitted, "Submit Review", "Cancel"
  
• Client: "Submit Review" for job app 123
• Service: job app 123, review1, "Submit Review", "Cancel", "Reject"
• Client: "Submit Review" for job app 123
• Service: job app 123, reviewed, "Submit Interview", "Cancel", "Reject"
  

Understanding how to encode an imperative SOA static model to a conversational document interchange is not really that well understood yet (certainly to me). I think someday it will be, but right now there is just the quotes from the REST thesis I commented on and a reference to "data reactive programming" from Roy Fielding, and I just found Mimosa.

Just need to make sure of something about the Job Application Service example: is this service the provider or consumer of the lifecycle of a job app? It clearly has an internal state machine for job apps, but what other machine process does that get shared with?

[1] Some discussion (still searching for link...) hinted that WADL could be simply returned like an HTML Form, and not used to statically generate code. I think avoids the coupling of code-gen, but I'm not sure how it solves the problem of shared understanding either.