Simple enough?

I attended a symposium last week with one of our key integrators. The keynote was given by one of their architect on “REST Architectures“.
While the key message was that we ought to make many architectures a
lot simpler (we call these “Gas factories” in French) is sound, he
failed to convince me on most of the content. A few things mentioned :

1/ “Notepad is the only tool needed for REST architectures”. Please use “vi or Notepad” at least! ;-)
2/ As defined in REST, everything is a resource accessible through a URI. I could almost agree with that.
3/ All you need is HTTPS or X509 certificate for any security needs. Of course it depends on what you mean by “security”…
4/ “SOAP/WSDL is for dummies”, that probably relates to point #1 which makes is difficult to manipulate XML… There’s no notion of a contract (WSDL, IDL, Interface, …) with REST I guess.
5/ JavaScript is the only language needed. No comment there…

I’m lazy and since bloglines.com didn’t provide me with WSDL for my favorite tool to chew on it, I never tried it.

“Things should be made as simple as possible, but no
simpler.” — Albert Einstein
I felt like Albert after this talk.