Why aren't there any WS-* standards for REST web services?

I was thinking into digging a little dipper into the REST type of we开发者_如何学Gob services and noticed that there aren't any specifications for it as opposed to SOAP web services.

Why is that?

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Each language uses its own standards. According to Wikipedia:

Unlike SOAP-based web services, there is no "official" standard for RESTful web services. This is because REST is an architecture, unlike SOAP, which is a protocol.

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http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html - Http Uniform interface specification

http://tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/ - Latest revisions to HTTP spec

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-gregorio-uritemplate-04 - URI Templates

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-nottingham-http-link-header-06 - Link Headers and link relations

http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/ - Loads of links to specs for media types

These should be all the specs you need to get going to build a RESTful system over HTTP.

Are there specific WS-* specifications that you feel you are missing to be able to build as REST based system?

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Well, at least for Java there is JAX-RS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAX-RS, but i don't know if this is based on some other standards.

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OData (http://docs.oasis-open.org/odata/odata/v4.0/odata-v4.0-part1-protocol.html) is a standard for RESTful WebServices and should fit your needs (at least if you're using any MS framework).

Btw. if you want do use a standard and make the WebService as open and reusable as possible, WADL (http://www.w3.org/Submission/wadl/#x3-40001.3) the WSDL equivalent for REST could help.