Sanjiva Weerawarana, Founder, Chairman & CEO of WSO2, the open source SOA company, takes apart the WS-* vs. REST debate and clearly separates the facts from the myths and the lies.

"Long live WS-*! WS-* is dead! REST is great! May it rest in peace! Which one is it? WS-* or REST? It turns out that both camps are lying through their teeth about how "easy" it is to build distributed business applications using their favorite technological approach.

First of all, there is no easy way to build distributed applications- that's simply a hard problem. WS-* and REST each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Knowing the realities of these different approaches for building distributed systems is critical for being able to make the right choices (and hence sleep restfully under a starry night)."

Sanjiva gave this presentation twice in the last two weeks - once at QCon San Francisco [1] and then at ApacheCon US [2]. The ApacheCon presentation is slightly updated from the one at QCon.

• Presentation [2] at QCon on Thursday, November 8th.
• Presentation [2] at ApacheCon on Thursday, November 15th