SOA and APP

During a recent job interview they told me that one of their new technical directions is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). So I'm thinking okay, Web Services probably figures into that somehow... But unfortunatley (or maybe fortunately) the last time I touched any of that stuff (UDDI, WSDL, SOAP) was at least a couple years ago. So I started Googling to get up to speed again...

All the regular Web Services stuff is still out there but I found a couple other articles/blog entries/presentations by Joe Gregorio that are much more profound:

• Implementing the Atom Publishing Protocol
• How to create a REST protocol
• The Atom Publishing Protocol: Publishing Web Content with XML and HTTP
  

In the meantime I also watched a presentation by David Heinemeir Hansson called "Discovering a world of resources" (slides, video) where he describes something obviously influenced by the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP).

My interpretation of all this is that we tend to naively use just the GET and POST methods of the HTTP protocol and tend to be fairly inconsistent and sloppy in how we choose our URIs. These articles suggest that we can more wisely and efficiently use all of HTTP's methods to provide basic CRUD functionality:

CREATE - POST
READ - GET
UPDATE - PUT
DELETE - DELETE

Rather than reinventing the wheel with SOAP and all the WS-* standards we can just keep it simple with HTTP. Sounds pretty smart to me.