[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: REST has too many verbs

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: REST has too many verbs
• From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
• Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 21:17:29 -0800
• References: <200202112151.QAA09003@m...> <E16aP5Q-00037q-00@s...>

Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:
> 
> On Monday 11 February 2002 04:51 pm, Mark Baker wrote:
> > There are many application protocols that retrieve stuff; FTP, IMAP,
> > NNTP, SMTP (VRFY & EXPN, for example).  To generalize those into
> > "GET", plus a URI to identify what is being "gotten", was a stroke
> > of brilliance.
> 
> I think it's questionable whether the unification has more to do with
> GET than with URI's themselves. FWIW. 

Be careful. URIs aren't innovative either. They are just email
addresses. 

> ... The unification happened a long
> time ago, before the WWW.... in the old days, email-><whatever>
> gateways existed.... I used them all the time to circumvent firewall
> policies ;-)

Right, a million point to point integrations is basically the same thing
as a unified model.

> > getFile(), getName(), getArticle(), getStockQuote() were what we had
> > *before* the Web.  I can't see any reason to go back after seeing
> > what can be achieved with GET.
> 
> What does that have to do with REST then?

This is the essence of REST. I feel like you're just arguing for the
kick you get out of it.

"Over the past six years, the REST architectural style has been used to
guide the design
and development of the architecture for the modern Web, as presented in
Chapter 6. This
work was done in conjunction with my authoring of the Internet standards
for the
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Uniform Resource Identifiers
(URI), the two
specifications that define the generic interface used by all component
interactions on the
Web."

"REST therefore gains the separation of concerns of the client-server
style without the server scalability problem, allows information hiding
through a generic interface to enable encapsulation and
evolution of services, and provides for a diverse set of functionality
through downloadable
feature-engines."

"REST connectors provide a generic interface for accessing and
manipulating the value set of a resource, regardless of how the
membership function is defined or the type of software that is handling
the request."

"Each origin server provides a generic interface to its services as a
resource hierarchy. The
resource implementation details are hidden behind the interface."

"This constraint sacrifices some of the advantages of other
architectures, such as
the stateful interaction of a relevance feedback protocol like WAIS, in
order to retain the
advantages of a single, generic interface for connector semantics. In
return, the generic
interface makes it possible to access a multitude of services through a
single proxy."

 Paul Prescod

• References:
  • Re: REST has too many verbs
    • From: Mark Baker <distobj@a...>
  • Re: REST has too many verbs
    • From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>

• Prev by Date: Re: REST has too many verbs
• Next by Date: Array of #PCDATA
• Previous by thread: Re: REST has too many verbs
• Next by thread: Re: REST has too many verbs
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread