Hi,
Most of you already know that I really like the REST style, but in the case of OMWS I think these would be the only benefits:
- Simple methods like getAlgorithms, getLayers, getProgress, etc. could be invoked without using any XML. - No need to have SOAP headers and SOAP envelopes.
This would certainly simplify things, but at the same time it's not such a big difference. If during the biogeosdi meeting you had to deal with a REST API instead of the SOAPish one, my feeling is that the biggest benefit would be that you would not spend any time trying to get it working with existing SOAP libraries. I suppose this was the biggest problem: trying to get it working with a SOAP library that doesn't support document/literal well, or with a SOAP library that doesn't have good documentation.
If you didn't spend any time trying to get it working with SOAP libraries and if you concentrated only in generating the XML requests by hand and parsing the XML responses by hand (ignoring the SOAP headers), you could get it working with approximately the same effort as if it was a REST API. The document/literal SOAP style doesn't require you to deal with SOAP encoding, which would force you to use a SOAP library and could bring incompatibilities between SOAP libraries.
Another alternative would be to use the SOAP extension in PHP:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.soap.php
Or even this interesting tool, since OMWS has a WSDL file:
http://www.urdalen.no/wsdl2php/
Anyway, I just wanted to make these general comments about the subject.
Regards, -- Renato
On 15 Jul 2007 at 19:58, Tim Sutton wrote:
Hi All
I got a chance to read through through the final report - really great job! I think we need to take the comments on omws into account and implement it as a rest service at some stage. Javi thanks for bringing it all together and getting it sent off to Lee.
Regards
Tim