TheArchitect.co.uk - Jorgen Thelin's weblog

A funny thing happened on the way to the podium

The general content was well received, but I was quite surprised at the overall lack of awareness in the audience about REST and the whole concepts of URI addressable resources on the web. Maybe this was what I should have expected from such an audience, with an obvious long history in CORBA and RPC-style middleware, but I probably also need to remember just how close to the "bleeding-edge" my work takes me sometimes.

Most of the questions at the end of the talk were about confusion over what REST was (which I had skimmed through quickly in the talk, thinking this was an area of fairly widespread pre-knowledge), and questions about why object-oriented approaches (eg. CORBA) were not suitable in these cases.

I found myself in the funny position of almost evangelizing the REST approach, and providing several examples when it was "THE BEST" (tm) way to do things. Mark Baker would have been proud of me! ;-)
I still haven't bought the complete REST religion as the one-and-only-true-way, but I certainly acknowledge there ARE cases where REST is a good choice, and this continued into some discussions over lunch with people from the German Press Association about using REST with NewsML and publishing fully linkable news stories.

Possible the strangest thing of all though was that the conference was being sponsored by Microsoft - previously the arch-enemy of the OMG. How times have changed!

Michael Platt from the Platform Strategy Group at Microsoft delivered a good presentation of their GXA vision, although I don't think many of the CORBA-heads grocked the full implications of what was being said here.