I really like the idea of "WCF Data Services" but how does it work in a real life scenario? WCF Data Services provide just a nice way for the client to CRUD the data. However it's very limited in what you can pass and get back. So one ends up having all the business logic written on a client side. It's probably ok for small applications who just need a database back-end. You don't want that in serious enterprise applications, your client side will grow too large and if your business logic is some kind of know-how it can be easily disassembled.
A:
I can understand your confusion given the naming... WCF Data Services are REST based which are notoriously poor for enterprise environments. Howvever, you can have normal SOAP based WCF services which work fine for the enterprise.
vidalsasoon
2009-12-22 14:28:48
I see your point. I guess WCF Data Services are just another flavor of REST.
Vitalik
2009-12-22 19:08:33
Going back to the purpose. If you really want interoperability and REST exposure wouldn't it make more sense to implement a more conventional REST service? Something that can be consumed by Java or PHP or Javascript?
Vitalik
2009-12-22 19:13:01
I don't wanna get into the debate of REST vs SOAP... anyway i'm sure it's been asked many times on SO...
vidalsasoon
2009-12-23 15:25:49
+2
A:
Don't be misled that SOAP is for enterprise and REST is for sucky little side web apps. Many people have wasted a lot of time on SOAP frameworks, me included and the trouble that these frameworks cause for inter-enterprise communication would count into the Billions of dollars.
REST provides an opportunity to only care about the data being passed too and from services and the semantics used to operate against services, the rest (excuse the pun) is handled by transport level mechanisms. Do you want encrypted data channels? Well HTTPs is there for that. Do you need authentication? there are plenty of frameworks on HTTP that support this already rather than use complex WS-* protocols. Do you want Reliable Messaging? you can engineer it quite simply using message queue software - I have only ever seen one SOAP framework handle this well and it wasn't very interoperable at that point.
Whilst I am not discounting SOAP as enterprise-grade, all I am saying it don't discount REST based services as an excellent way for your enterprise modules to communicate.
I personally have integrated multi-million dollar systems using REST and SOAP and currently prefer REST based services for their ease of development and 3rd party integration, understanding, ease of documentation and their ability to rapidly deploy services across businesses.
Kinlan
2009-12-22 14:43:37