WSDL/SOAP are not REST. I'm telling you that REST was popularized by Rails, because it was the first major web framework to use it. You've yet to refute that argument, but you do continue to be rude, so have a good one!
Well if you define REST as "Web Apps developed with RoR" then I guess you're right, Rails is definiteley the pioneer of Rails development.
>You've yet to refute that argument
There was (at least) Tomcat deployed and quite popular, and yep, everything moved through REST interfaces. Even with that one and the huge success it had in the enterprise world, I wouldn't dare to say that the success of REST relies on Tomcat anyway.
REST hit it big with the www, www is REST's killer app. Those things are quite literally the first ones you should know when you start developing for the web.
The funny part is that technically Rails and Rails-inspired REST frameworks get it wrong. They're just exposing the server-side models via REST interface and the server-side models in turn expose the database's tables. That's REST by the books but not particularly useful unless all you're interested is exposing your database tables to the clients.
Automagic REST APIs may be easier to do with "RESTful" MVC frameworks but what you really want is a domain-oriented REST API. But I digress.
Here's a handy test to determine if two technological terms mean the same thing: are they used interchangeably? If I said to someone, "oh that looks like you need a SOAPful interface," would they assume that I meant RESTful? Probably not, since they're two different technologies. The move to REST was actually inspired by the perceived deficiencies in WSDL and SOAP.
> The funny part is that technically Rails and Rails-inspired REST frameworks get it wrong.
Well, that's a bit tangential to my original point. I wasn't claiming that you specifically liked the way it was implemented, just that Rails, and thus the Ruby community, was responsible for its popularity. Despite the length of this thread, neither of you has managed to debunk that claim with anything resembling evidence.
Find a reference to Tomcat using REST before 2007, and give us the link. I'd bet you can't, since Rails was the first major web framework to implement REST.
> REST hit it big with the www, www is REST's killer app.
Since REST was invented in 2000, and the web itself had been around for a bit before that, I fail to see how this could be true.
"The first edition of REST was developed between October 1994 and August 1995, primarily as a means for communicating Web concepts as we wrote the HTTP/1.0 specification and the initial HTTP/1.1 proposal. It was iteratively improved over the next five years and applied to various revisions and extensions of the Web protocol standards."
- Roy T, Fielding, Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, 2000
