Scott Davis (Musings on Java and Open Source) What's so funny about Java, OS X, Peace, Love, and Understanding?

Coming on the heels of my Real World Web Services talk last night (PDF), Tim Bray's post on the same same topic is especially timely. He is the father of XML and ATOM (and writes a darn good blog to boot). I'd love to imply that he has been deeply influenced by my work, but I think it's probably evident that the opposite is true. (grin)

His post, in turn, comments on a Gartner article talking about the same thing -- SOAP == WS, but WS != SOAP and only SOAP. REST, JSON, and YAML (among others) are bringing new players to the WS table -- if they stay around and gain some traction, SOA will be interesting all over again.

And the influences of REST are popping up in all sorts of unexpected places. For instance, ActiveMQ offers a RESTful interface that allows you to use HTTP GETs and POSTs to pop and push JMS messages onto a queue. Clever. Just as Hibernate forced us as a community to reevaluate persistence strategies, and Spring showed us a more agile J2EE stack, REST seems to be leading the way towards a kinder, gentler SOA. ("Agile SOA" has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?)

Bottom line: I've said to everyone who will listen that the eye candy of AJAX is what caught everyone's attention, but the SOA-aspect of it is what will give it real staying power. I'm not afraid of going on record saying that I *like* the term Web 2.0. AJAX isn't simply HTML++ -- there's really something different going on here. Think Different, indeed...