RESTful applications (good idea) and interface contacts (required good idea)

On first and second impression, RESTful concepts do not appear to be consistent with application “contracts”. In fact, they appear to do away with them. Abandon the awful soaps and wsdls!

But “contracts” matter. At the very least, documenting the data structures. You won’t get very far if neither the supplier and receiver have a “good” way of knowing what they’re exchanging.

Sure wsdls suck, but don’t pretend you don’t need something else in their place.

3 months into the question (which I should have answered by now, since I’m developing a RESTful web application), I found the first article today that gave me a deep “aha”.

Definitely not the final answer, and really only a sketched out idea, but it immediately goes deeper than anything else I’ve seen.

http://www.infoq.com/articles/subbu-allamaraju-rest