[axis2] What is the purpose of disableREST parameter?

[Rajith Attapattu <ra...@gmail.com>]

Folks,

I think the disableREST parameter is confusing at best and misleading at
worst.
Frankly I don't see how it adds any value to the end user other than giving
our critics another bashing point.

Confusing/Misleading as in, it gives the end user the wrong impression that
by flipping the switch it would magically make their service RESTful.
Frankly it has absolutely no bearing on whether your service is RESTful or
not. All it does is switching between the POX and SOAP message formats.

Simply bcos u use POX and WSDL 2.0 HTTP binding doesn't mean your service is
RESTful, neither does it mean your service is not RESTful if you are using
SOAP.
REST does not define any constraints on the messaging format, other than to
say "Self describing messages".
As long as your representation contains hypermedia to navigate to other
states ("Hypermedia as the engine of application state")  and provided you
satisfy the other constraints your service can be RESTful even when u use
SOAP (or some other format, ex HTML) to provide that representation.

I really don't think that a framework alone can help that much to make your
service RESTful.
A lot depends on the service author on how he designs his resource and the
network of state transitions by defining the relationships among other
resources.
Sanjiva's blog post <http://www.bloglines.com/blog/sanjiva?id=227> describes
this properly.

We need to educate the end user by explaining that they need to play a large
role in making their services RESTful.
We should also rename the disableREST to disableSOAP to indicate that we are
switching between messaging formats.
It would be a terrible mistake to think that we can change an architectural
style by flipping a switch no matter how we design our service.

Regards,

Rajith