intertwingly

It’s just data

Surviving Slashdot


I was able to survive a slashdotting yesterday.  The solution was simple:

Redirect /wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared http://www.tbray.org/atom/RSS-and-Atom

The key issue wasn’t so much load as it was trolls.

My ability to do so, and so easily, speaks volumes about the power of the REST architecture.  Consider:

The foundation for most of this is rooted in the tantalizing phrase hypermedia as the engine of application state.  If one views a wiki as a state machine, then being able to do a redirect is effectively changing the programming of the application.

The fact that I was able to do all this with but a single line of code — and using only the protocols and products that were already installed — was of great value to me yesterday.  In fact, if one were predisposed to use such terms, I would go so far as to say it was of significant business value to me.

This is part of the reason for my continued skepticism when I hear claims that Indigo will be providing first class support for building REpresentational State Transfer (REST) web services.