Twitter has launched the rumor mill about a possible decision to abandon the Ruby on Rails framework. The decision comes as no surprise to anyone who has followed Twitter since its inception. The Rails framework has never experienced the kind of stress and load testing that Twitter has put it up against. The test have not always been successful which is apparent by their three day outage surrounding the Macworld event this year. As a result of these outages, employees at Twitter have been known to speak out about the work that needs to be done on the framework in order to allow applications on a large scale. These comments have been harshly received by Rails founder, DHH.

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A couple days ago I promised an article analyzing the SOAP approach to building a web service. Well here I am keeping those promises for you all. SOAP can be looked at as the tried and true method for developing a web service. It has been around much longer than REST and currently has a much larger user base. SOAP is another technical acronym meaning ‘Simple Object Access Protocol’. It was originally developed as a replacement for the popular XML-RPC which even I do not know much about (its that dated). Since I am much more versed in REST than SOAP I will give you a quick breakdown on how it differs from REST. If you want more information, post a comment and I will find the answer for you.

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It is about time someone listed out a list of the most valuable private web startups. Even if this list is highly arbitrary it gives you an idea of how a simple concept can turn a huge profit. This goes back to my previous article about building a business model for developers. After reading the article, I do find some of those numbers hard to believe like the value of Digg.

Keeping with the trend of web services, I figured I would take the time to give a brief overview of the two major service types. The one I will obviously cover first is the called REST. This is an acronym for Representational State Transfer, but that does not really tell you much about it. REST is the newcomer when compared to its popular counterpart, SOAP. The idea behind REST is quite simple, its base principle is that everything is a resource. This is similar in principle to object-oriented principles which treats everything as an independent object. Since every resource is independent from each other, the programmer must set up relations between these resources in order to provide access links to related data.

Once the structure is setup with the required resources we need a way to modify these resources. REST provides a very simple interface for manipulation, it uses the existing HTTP protocol that has been around for over a decade. Now if you are familiar with HTTP protocol you are thinking, “So all you do is use GET and POST commands?” Well, yes you do use these but other requests are required. GET and POST are the most common of the two because these are the only ones primarily used by web browsers. However there are actually nine different request types in the HTTP protocol. A few of these are GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE. 

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One thing I seem to come across when talking about new startup ideas for companies is the implementation of some sort of web service. I have personal experience building these type of services so I figured I would take a brief moment and talk about the technology behind them.

The first thing that you must understand is that a web service on the surface looks like nothing more than your average web site. I am sure most the sites you visit have a web service hidden in the background and you have no indication that it is even there. This is the beauty of the system, the service is only visible to those who really look for it. Transparency of this type of system is a thing of beauty, but this does not mean security is not important.

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