Are RESTful web services ideal in a SOA?

Representational State Transfer (RESTful) web services are the latest buzz in the web services domain. What are RESTful web services? RESTful web services consists of HTTP clients which send requests as request parameters in the URL and the response is a XML document which can be viewed in a browser. This is ideal service for technologies like Asychronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) which take XML responses and apply XML transforms (XSLT) to generate a visually pleasing display of content. AJAX's primary mode of transport is through the HTTP browser and it's mode of transport is HTTP or HTTPS. Currently other developers and vendors like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft have harnessed the AJAX technologies, RESTful services and RSS feeds to generate data aggregators which allow users to find, aggregator, and filter from various data sources how ever they are merely point-to-point services. AJAX working with RESTful web services is the ideal model for the federated query where one request is federated across multiple data sources and then the responses from each data source is aggregated to show the "full" picture.

Yes RESTful web services are not that bulky since they have don't have the SOAP wrapper however let us not get caught up in RESTful services are ideal in a SOA enterprise. The problem with REST is that it is designed for point-to-point services with minimal reuse. This is the same type of problem where SOAP based services exposed method calls which required specific datatypes in their Web Services Description Language (WSDL). When it is a point-to-point services, alot of work is spent in formatting, transformation and processing information to fit the specific datatypes in the non-reusable methods. To make a SOAP based web service more SOA friendly, it is recommended that the services take XML documents as the parameters in the web services method calls. This way one XML document can be passed around where the contents of the XML document might be altered by various method calls. It is not practical for RESTful web services to pass a reference to a XML document as a request parameter.

RESTful web services are great with AJAX however I wouldn't recommend using RESTful web services for services which are highly popular, reliable and have a potential to be reused alot.