Please Don't Pick on the Donkey

More Steve...

REST is unproven. Sigh. I can’t decide if people say this because they’re just trying to stir up an argument, or they’re so heavily biased toward their non-REST approaches that they just can’t even consider that there might be viable alternatives, or they really have no clue about what REST is, how it works, and why it works, and they’re not interested in learning it, so they just react badly whenever they hear it, or all of the above. If you’re anti-REST or REST-ignorant, and you haven’t read RESTful Web Services, then don’t even talk to me about REST. The book is absolutely wonderful, and its explanations and answers are extremely clear. If you consider yourself informed and capable when it comes to distributed systems and integration, but you don’t know REST, then there’s simply no way you can read that book and not have it lead you to seriously question your core beliefs regarding how you think such systems should be built, unless you’re completely close-minded of course...

What do mono-language programmers have to do with ESBs? It’s all part of the same culture, the “one size fits all” approach, where you have answers looking for problems rather than the other way around, and where people intentionally wear blinders to less expensive, more productive, and far more flexible and agile approaches because “it’s just not the way we do things around here.”...

At the end of the day, if you want to ignore my advice on using REST and dynamic languages, that’s your own problem.

And where his previous post received a comment, apparently from a Neudesic employee (ever heard of Neudesic???)...

Sonic Software, BEA, IBM, IONA, TIBCO, webMethods, Cape Clear, Fiorano, Oracle, Software AG, Neudesic, And how many open source projects????

All deliver ESB’s. It seems highly unlikely that all of these organizations, with plenty of smart folks, could be incorrect. Moreover, Gartner, Forester, ZapThink, and Burton, all speak loudly about ESB’s being an enabling technology on the road to building workable SOA’s.

Oh, dear. Steve responds best...

Making a list of smart companies to prove a point, well, doesn’t actually prove anything. I bet there are some actual smart people out there who have locked themselves out of their car, for example, or deleted whole directories they really wanted to keep but never backed up, or even paid actual money for a Zune. What does that prove?...

Unlike most of the commenters on this posting, I’ve personally built at least one of everything I’m talking about, on the ESB side and on the REST side, so I’m extremely confident in my opinion. I’d therefore much rather get specifics from you.