Webservices - Ménage à trois

Here I want to write down a little reminder to myself about current Webservices techniques.

RPC - Remote Procedure Call
Uses XML encoded Data types for communication.


WSDL - Webservices
So this is powering all the SOA(P?!) Hype. I have only some limited experience with some WSDL Webservices build using .NET 1.0 / 2.0.
Visual Studio holds your hand very nicely (as expected) for simple stuff. But to deal with more complex and custom Objects it would be very interesting i guess. I tried a "quick" example to get a Java client to interact with a .NET Webservice and it failed miserably.


REST - Representational State Transfer
Usually it goes like this: You have some kind of data and then you think about API's, how to access or manipulate this data. REST turns things a little upside down. There is a well defined set of operations : GET, PUT, DELETE. The concept is focused on the interaction of state full resources.


It will be interesting to see how these will develop in the future.