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RE: REST has too many verbs

• To: 'Sean McGrath' <sean.mcgrath@p...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: REST has too many verbs
• From: Jeff Lowery <jlowery@s...>
• Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 16:45:00 -0800

I would like to add that in addition to its apparent simplicity, the name
has certain appeal to the lazy programmer.

(Apologies to the list, and to the first person who made that obvious pun
[it was probably Sean]).


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sean McGrath [mailto:sean.mcgrath@p...]
> Sent: Friday, February 15, 2002 8:22 AM
> To: xml-dev@l...
> Subject: Re:  REST has too many verbs
> 
> 
> At 23:23 11/02/2002 +0000, Alaric Snell wrote:
> >Thinking on different scales. An object-oriented distributed 
> hypermedia
> >system would have getName() et al depending on the precise 
> class of object
> >involved - and a standard interface, getUserView(), that 
> returns HTML or
> >whatever.
> >
> >With the Web, we got the HTML-retrieval part and now we have 
> to do all this
> >XML mess to get back to getName() and friends (computer-accessible
> >interfaces...)
> 
> Not so - this is, I suggest "RPC think". Don't think RPC - think 
> "conversation". A conversation
> is a collection of discrete "messages"[1], exchanged over 
> time according to 
> some
> agreed protocol. There is a big difference between "here is a 
> purchase order"
> and "SendPurchaseOrder()".
> 
> The former is a message (not a method call), classified in 
> some taxonomy. They
> can be sent to and received from URIs with HTTP.
> 
> Armed with these, I can build a distributed system on the 
> Web. I do not 
> need detailed
> and fixed knowledge of an object model with associated method 
> signatures to 
> build a
> distributed system.
> 
> The beauty of the URI-centric approach is that it allows a 
> greater level of 
> de-coupling
> between the various actors in a distributed system.  I do not 
> need to (and 
> the failure
> of Corba shows it is a bad idea to) inter-twingle systems via 
> shared object 
> models.
> 
> Sean
> [1] The world of distributed computing conversations is not 
> aided by the 
> fact that the
> word "message" means different things to different people. In 
> particular the OO
> interpretation as "method invocation" carries layers of 
> semantic baggage not
> shared by other uses of the term in distributed computing.
> 
> 
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