jonnay: All this jazz about HTTP error messages, methods
beyond GET and POST, its all just good HTTP baby. It has very
little to do with actual restfulness or not. All the HTTP
conformance in the world wont mean a thing if your application
stores client state on the server. You still won’t be
RESTful.
I’ll add that there is a huge gap between “this
particular application only needs GET and POST”, and
“never use PUT”.
In all, it looks like my
optimism of nearly three and a half years ago was largely
unwarranted.
Service Oriented Architectures are fundamentally
procedural. Resource Oriented Architectures are
object oriented.
Which defines more methods on the “Object” class:
Java, C#, Python, Ruby or SmallTalk? Is counting methods the
way to determine which is the “best” language?
Note that each provides an equivalent of toString().
Where’s the toString in SOAP?
The web is all about
Duck
Typing. If you can respond to HTTP GET, then I can work
with you.
Where’s the toString in SOAP?
In Java, C#, Python, Ruby or SmallTalk, do you get to place method calls anywhere in the grammar?
No. Similarly, HTTP doesn’t have a general concept of transclusion whereby the server can inject instructions to “insert the results of the following GET request here”.
Perhaps my analogy is flawed, but the point I was trying to make was that Java introduces a well defined concept of Object, and creates the expectation that all such Objects respond to toString method calls. Of course, it can’t guarantee that such calls return anything meaningful and don’t result in the dreaded NullPointerException, but the point is that the expectation is set.
We can both point to cases where this expectation isn’t met in HTTP. Some XML namespaces and most SOAP endpoints, for example.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of REST is the focus on uniform interface to resources via their representations.
Kicking the RESTafarian beehive... the score thus far:
Whoah. Lots and lots of action is happening in the blogosphere about the division between Hi REST and Lo REST (which I argue is completely bunk, and still do).
First off, I should mention Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah who, like me, is all about the Elevator Pitch
Jon Udell: Only if you consider the Google maps interface of today and the MapQuest interface that existed at the time Google maps was introduced as being “roughly the same”. I don’t. The abstractions and patterns...
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