mca blog

Leonard Richardson has a nice post on a simple heuristic for judging the maturity of Web services.

By now it's a cliche to observe that allegedly "RESTful" web services like Amazon's SimpleDB and the Flickr web service and the del.icio.us web service aren't really RESTful. But there's something about them that makes their creators distinguish them from SOAP-based web services (by calling them "RESTful"), and there's something about those services that users love despite the possibility of, eg. deleting data by accident. Rather than say one service is more or less "RESTful" than another, attempting to quantify an easy-to-misuse term that wasn't even intended to be used in relation to web services, I've found it useful to judge web services based on how many of the web technologies they adopt.

this is part of one of his recent talks. i'm looking forward to the video when it's posted.