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REST is the new SOAP (in a bad sense)

Two little anecdotes that happened within the last two weeks to me:
  1. A buddy and I discuss how ...(something)... could be implemented, we find a solution, but we cannot do it that way, because he's afraid that the developers supposed to implement it will not find it RESTful enough.
  2. Another buddy is told by his CTO to implement a REST interface in his Rails app because that would render the controller's code cleaner (or some similarly daft idea). By the way, there was no business need to do an external XML-based interface other than "REST is cool".
If the idea that something should be RESTful gets into the way of getting things done and if things thought to be RESTful are done for the sake of it, well, then REST has become the new dogma. In this sense it is the rightful heir of SOAP and SOA (and it is the the flavour of the year for 2008).
You might also want to look at Roy Fielding's presentation at Railsconf (p.28):
and REST(ful) became the next industry buzzword
Yikes!

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