This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by David Heinemeier Hansson. Original Post: The enviable destruction of the WS-Deathstar Feed Title: Loud Thinking Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LoudThinking Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by David Heinemeier Hansson Latest Posts From Loud Thinking

It feels like we've reached the last twenty minutes of A New Hope. The rebellion has the schematics for the deathstar and their army has charted the course for a final showdown. The battle is far from over, but you, the viewer, are no longer in doubt which way its going to turn out.

Yet to the commanders on deck, I'm sure it looks like they have nothing to worry about. The standardization of the standards is progressing full-speed ahead. We have committees to oversee the committees. So the mumblings of a small band of renegade hackers is hardly going to matter. Don't they know that the battle station is soon to be fully operational?

It's a common and recurrent theme, of course. I'm sure the pushers of EJB and Corba felt equally invincible long after their rebels had captured the plans for their dismantle. Perhaps that's just how a large sector of the IT industry has to work. There must be a new frontier of bottom-less complexity available to get lost in. Something that needs tooling, big consulting houses, five-year mission statements, and barriers of entry and exit.

Anyway, I just wanted to do a virtual "I'm getting out the popcorn for this one!". It's fun to watch in real time. Especially when the battle is being narrated so eloquently by people like Pete Lacey, see The S stands for Simple, and Duncan Cragg, see The REST Dialogues.

I'm also thrilled that the forthcoming Rails 1.2 is all about making REST as natural to web developers as possible. There's certainly an awful lot of people who could not care less one way or the other. They are the ones at stake. And it's not even that hard. REST is already easy. Throw a little help, guidance, and baked-in convention into the mix and the response to a request for a SOAP interface will soon be a common "you want me to do what?!?!".