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Change Resistance

Stefan Tilkov,

In all fairness, Mike Champion makes an excellent argument in a comment at Dare’s blog:

The strength of the service-oriented approach as opposed to a resource-oriented or spaces-oriented approach, is that it is a whole lot easier to map those unconstrained verbs to the existing software infrastructure that nobody dares to rewrite than it would be to reconceptualize it using some unfamiliar paradigm.

I agree; while I’m convinced the REST style has significant advantages, it requires a change that — at least in some cases — may not be worth it. After one of my last REST talks, I got into a discussion with someone who had opened up a bunch of RPG programs with a generic Web services layer, and given that they were transactional in nature anyway, this was arguably much easier than rethinking them in resource terms.