RESTafarian Jihad

I've just been accused of waging a RESTafarian Jihad. I feel that this accusation is unjust, and that it is uncalled for. So I need to explain and defend my case here.

Jihad is a strong word in this context, because it came to mean 'holy war' in the modern parlance. And I'm nowhere near waging a holy war on anything, least of on the non-REST platforms.

To be more specific, I am absolutely not interested in converting the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) people to REST. True, approximately 98% to 99% of all software developers I've ever met cannot imagine building a distributed software system without utilizing some form of RPC, so for these people, Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA) is meaningless.

But as I've already explained in one of my recent posts, I view these people as a write-off. Basically, I think there is nothing we can do about that, and that it's time we cut our losses and move on with our lives.

So you see, I'm leaving the RPC crowd (which means almost all software developers in existence today) alone. I'm not waging any Jihads, I'm not plotting to convert anyone.

Instead, I strongly believe that, as it has always been the case, the simpler system, with lower barriers to entry, will somehow win in the end. I don't really know how, but God's ways are mysterious, so we'll see. But same as CORBA had to disappear because it was just too unwieldy, web services and SOA will also be forced to vanish from the scene.

At that point, ROA will take the lead. Right now, we're preparing for that portentous event. It will come in its own sweet time. We're not rushing anything.

We know that, eventually, people will abandon the ways of the past century, and will embrace the twenty first century ways of employing high technology.