A Thought on Rails and Web Services

A very simple thought occurred to me the other day about Rails, REST, and Web services. The WS-* platforms had sidestepped web application frameworks when it came to the business of developing web services. At the most, you might tunnel service requests through a single controller before passing them on to whatever was processing the WS-* protocols. All that work you might have done in crafting your web application didn't mean much when it came to the Web service. In fact, you would have to start all over. It is not just a matter of work, of course, but of skill sets. WS-* spurned the lowly web developer. You gotta read 15 books and take 20 classes before you're up there with the big boys doing enterprise service stacks.

It seems to me that REST and Rails are an effort to grab mindshare about whether the web application framework should have something to do with a web service. I find it interesting that it took us this long to hit upon this simple proposition. For example, there is nothing to a prevented earlier WAFs from having tried a similar grab at mindshare. REST on Struts could have been the hype five years ago. In fairness, the Java frameworks tend to try to specialize and see having only a single purpose as a virtue. I don't know much in Java open-source that aims to be as pervasive as Rails.

Of course, Java had other reasons for fighting REST. Web services are a direct competitor to EJB as a means of enterprise interoperability. And dropdead simple web services rout EJB for all but a few use cases. What is more, using frameworks, not conventions, is the Java away.

Java always took a particular attitude toward simplicity. In the Java world, simplicity was code generation. Java products often advertise themselves by how much code they can generate. In my world, simplicity is emphatically not code generation. Code generation is a sure sign that something has gone seriously wrong with my tool set. Generated code (until the days that code is generated by a bona fide AI) is always somehow a conceptual redundancy in an application. And redundancy is going to become a maintenance burden.

It is quite simply very exciting that we are now moving away from the idea of adopting standards for the sake of the tools we can fetch to help observe them, and that we are moving towards the idea that standards are wonderful because of how they allow us to participate in a service and software ecosystem that has been built around them. One was the vision of big software vendors eager to make large-scale sales. The other was the vision behind the W3C protocols.