The "REST vs. WS-* War" is Over?

David Chappell:

To anybody who’s paying attention and who’s not a hopeless partisan, the war between REST and WS-* is over. The war ended in a truce rather than crushing victory for one side—it’s Korea, not World War II. The now-obvious truth is that both technologies have value, and both will be used going forward.

I couldn’t disagree more — I’m seeing this particular reasoning more and more often in the last few months:

A RESTful approach is a natural for data-oriented applications that focus on create/read/update/delete scenarios.

… with the implicit assumption that this restricts RESTful HTTP to an alternative applicable only for a subset of scenarios. To which I say: Bullshit.

Update: Peter Williams writes:

I expect that when all is said and done WS-* will still be around. But rather than as a vibrate technology platform, the way Mr Chappell seems to anticipate, I think it survive in a way far more like the way Cobol is still around today: as a zombie, unkillable and ready to eat the brain of anyone who wanders too close the legacy systems.

Update 2: Elliotte Rusty Harold:

That’s a nice analogy. Take it one step further though. WS-* is North Korea and REST is South Korea. While REST will go on to become an economic powerhouse with steadily increasing standards of living for all its citizens, WS-* is doomed to sixty+ years of starvation, poverty, tyranny, and defections until it eventually collapses from its own fundamental inadequacies and is absorbed into the more sensible policies of its neighbor to the South.