REST vs. SOAP In Amazon Web Services

tadghin writes "I was recently talking with Jeff Barr, creator of syndic8 and now Amazon's chief web services evangelist. He let drop an interesting tidbit. Amazon has both SOAP and REST interfaces to their web services, and 85% of their usage is of the REST interface." Read on for some more thoughts and information on REST and Web services, including information about a free Web services seminar on April 22nd. " Despite all of the corporate hype over the SOAP stack, this is pretty compelling evidence that developers like the simpler REST approach. (I'm sure there are applications where SOAP is better, but I've always liked technologies that have low barriers to entry and grassroots adoption, and simple XML over HTTP approach seems to have that winning combination.)

Amazon's web services have attracted a thriving community, people are making real money building alternate interfaces to Amazon and collecting Associates commissions on the resulting sales, and there are even tool developers who have come up with the creative business model of agreeing with their users to have some percentage of the transactions use the tool developer's Associates id rather than the site owner's. Cool.

Amazon is holding a free all day web services workshop on April 22 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference. The event is open to people not registered at the conference (though space is limited to 50 people).

P.S. Slashdot really ought to have web services as a topic area! Despite being over-hyped, this is a really important area, and there's a lot cooking. Amazon's web services"