Just on the heels of talking to a TechTarget reporter on Friday about 2004 and the emergence of REST, comes this little tidbit (culled from m040601’s del.icio.us links):
It’s nice to see the pains that Amazon takes to make it clear that, when it says “web services” it doesn’t just mean SOAP-based web services, but REST too. According to Jeff Barr, Amazon’s web services evangelist, 80% of the developers using AWS prefer the REST interface. (link)
The point I’m making here – and made to Preston on Friday – is not that SOAP does not have its place, nor that it’s not appropriate for many web services scenarios. In other words, I’m not making the sort of binary argument I’ve railed against previously.
But I am opposed to the REST stack being either ignored or portrayed as some sort of Web services second-class citizen, when the available evidence indicates that it’s the approach of choice for a great many developers out there.
