Beautiful Architecture (Chap. 5) - Resource-Oriented Architectures

It's great to know that there already exists several ROA implementations such as Ruby on Rails, NetKernel, Django, etc. because this article has convinced me that RESTful architectures are the future. Although my understanding of Web architecture is limited and I've never heard of ROA, the approach of using logical named interfaces would allow us to not worry about concrete implementations and give us the reassurance that it will scale as new technologies come and go. This is because we can use the same name (that's easy to remember) to retrieve the same data in different structural forms such as text, images, or in applications as shown in Figure 5-5 of page 101. In addition, by restricting REST to 4 variables, it makes it easy to design any operation imaginable which leads to a more scalable, flexible, and extensible architecture.

I remember going through the steep learning curve of implementing a Java application that had SOAP messages with MTOM attachments and had to figure out how to write-up a WSDL; it was unnecessarily brittle. Sure there are several online examples of using web services to send SOAP messages, but when you run into complex issues, you may have understand the nuts & bolts of it.