Mark Baker thinks GWS is on the right track, but fails the uniform interface litmus test:
I'm very encouraged to hear about REST being considered a cool and useful thing, and thank Jon for pushing that position. But (you knew this was coming, didn't you? 8-) it doesn't sound like Groove has it quite right. [Mark Baker]
Paul Prescod doesn't seem quite so concerned about which small set of verbs is used (GET/PUT/POST vs READ/UPDATE), but has concerns about the impedance mismatch between WSDL's addressing model and that of the Web:
They couldn't use HTTP GET because WSDL has such poor support for REST. I would guess they've built a REST-a-like on top of a standard single-endpoint SOAP services. I would guess that the addressing model is *still* broken into domain/port/service-path and resource-path whereas the Web has domain/port/resource-path. [rest-discuss]
I don't pretend to know the answers to these questions, but to me, the latter seems the more pressing concern.
(Update: On rereading Paul's message, it's clear he is saying essentially the same thing. "I wonder why they would use a READ method instead of the GET method embedded in the implementations of hundreds of tools and standards, from Xalan to Squid, XPath to the DOM. My guess is that the answers to those questions are linked. They couldn't use HTTP GET because WSDL has such poor support for REST...")
Hands-on experience with GWS will help to clarify the issues, I think. Meanwhile, I guess we can all agree that this Harper's-index-like statistic represents progress:
Occurrences of the term "web-friendly" in the SOAP 1.1 spec: 0
In the SOAP 1.2 primer: 9
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/11/07.html#a503