IONA chief engineer Steve Vinoski, author of one of the most influential CORBA books and a huge number of articles, has written a new column (PDF) for IEEE Internet Computing introducing REST from the perspective of a SOA developer.

In the article, Steve highlights the differences between a design that focuses on explicit contracts for each specific functionality and the uniform interface approach of REST. According to his own blog entry about it, it attempts to explain the benefits that REST brings to the distributed systems picture from the perspective of someone with a lengthy SOA background.

Steve's conclusion:

Unfortunately, many SOA developers are far too quick to dismiss REST tools, because their favorite programming language doesn’t directly support it, or because they believe REST is just HTTP. Even if you believe SOA is exactly the right approach for the applications you develop, truly under- standing REST can help you build more scalable and better performing distributed systems.

Read the full article here.