GIS Community Blocks Esri's Geospatial 'Open Standard' REST API 53
Bismillah writes "The developer of ArcGIS, Esri, has dropped its bid to have the GeoServices REST API recognized as an open standard by the Open Geospatial Consortium, after a community backlash against 'providing a vendor with significant market advantage, erring on the creation of a state-sanctioned monopoly.'"
Here is Open Letter from the open source community (Score:2, Informative)
I have been following this one on the sidelines, while I was initially annoyed with a version 1 standard not accepting change requests due to reasons of backwards compatibility (a very poor attitude). The real annoyance was ignoring/subsuming the GeoJSON work that has been really earning its keep for web mapping.
In anycase the Open Geospatial Consortium put together a letter here (http://www.lisasoft.com/blog/open-letter-ogc-re-geoservices-rest-api) which may of had some influence. A nice write up of the technical problems is here (http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2013-May/011667.html) thanks to Adrian Custer.
Personally I want to ensure the first extensive REST API to come out of the OGC is actually a REST API (as it needs to serve as an example for later standards). I trust the voting OGC members (including ESRI) can do better on their next time at bat.
is it even RESTful? (Score:4, Informative)
In taking a quick look a the standard, it doesn't even look RESTful. For example:
http://<mapservice-url>/layers
Returns deep copies of all layers and tables as opposed to a list of IDs. Then:
http://<featureservice-url>/<layerId>
Returns a deep copy of a particular layer/table.
How about http://<something>/layers returning a list of layers/tables and http://<something>/layers/{id} returning the particular table/layer? The whole /object and /object/{id} paradigm is missing. And that's just about GET. Regardless 800-lbs gorilla arguments against this "standard," I'd be more inclined to reject it due to its lack of adherence to standards.