Building Super-Scalable Web Systems with REST

I came across this blog posting that I thought was an interesting example of how the services should be oriented around the data and not the other way around.

http://www.udidahan.com/2008/12/29/building-super-scalable-web-systems-with-rest/

The idea here is that the data (in this case weather info) needs to be partitioned in a meaningful way (by location). REST services can then be created around this and utilize the caching available in HTTP.

By creating and organizing services around the domain's data model more efficient services can be created. This reinforces why SOA often ends up failing, because there is not enough emphasis on the data. It also highlights REST support for caching and cache validation built into the protocol. Other service/message specifications (like SOAP) would have more difficulty identify and implementing a caching mechanism.