Mike Amundsen is putting out lot of samples in his blog

re: Mike Amundsen is putting out lot of samples in his blog

ccchai — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:22:31 GMT

It is good to see SSDS is going to allow us to use both flex and/or typed entities.

I haven't explore much about Astoria, but I have one doubt here, isn't it Astoria exposes service through REST / ATOM only? If that is the case, what will happen to SOAP interface?

re: Mike Amundsen is putting out lot of samples in his blog

Soumitra Sengupta — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:39:03 GMT

Thanks for your comment.

It is a great question you ask. SSDS will continue to have both REST and SOAP interfaces.

This creates 2 challenges for alignment:

a. Query language - Astoria today do not have a query language per se

b. Symmetry of REST and SOAP interfaces. I would like to hear readers' thoughts on how important is it to keep the REST and SOAP interfaces symmetric along multiple dimensions (query language, security etc.)

re: Mike Amundsen is putting out lot of samples in his blog

mamund — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:19:53 GMT

My comments on the SOAP/REST interfaces:

While I think it is important to offer the same features for both SOAP and REST interfaces, I don't expect these features to be implmented in the same ways for both SOAP and REST.

For example, the REST model should be implemented to support a wide range of content types including the POX you have today, Atom, JSON, even plain-text and HTML. This approach would not make sense for SOAP.

As for security, SOAP may offer some functionality from the WS-* stack that is not appropriate for REST. However, both should support more than HTTP Basic Authentication. For example, REST should support Digest, OAuth, and the Identity/Claims model (via Zermatt project?).

The meta data for REST calls should appear in HTTP Headers instead of forcing this into the body of a POST message while SOAP uses the payload to hold both data and meta-data.

The query details may also be different. REST queries should continue to be designed to work via the URL using the GET method. This provides the most opportunity for caching and support for intermediaries in the future. The SOAP interface will probably need to continue to use the payload to hold queries and can take an entirely different approach to modeling the query statement.

Forcing SOAP to use HTTP-style implementations (HTTP Headers, sub-optimal query style) would be a mistake. Steering the REST implementation to rely on meta-data in a POST body when requesting data would also diminish the value of SSDS.

Again, staying true to the standards and practices of each architecture makes the most sense.

re: Mike Amundsen is putting out lot of samples in his blog

vontlin — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 07:12:13 GMT

did anything change in the service reference?

http://data.sitka.microsoft.com/soap/v1?wsdl --> this doesn't work?