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Re: A question about REST and transaction isolation

• To: XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: A question about REST and transaction isolation
• From: David Megginson <dmeggin@a...>
• Date: Mon, 09 Feb 2004 09:22:05 -0500
• In-reply-to: <86bro8etmc.fsf@f...>
• References: <861xp5f4ov.fsf@f...> <4026E5A0.7060209@a...> <86bro8etmc.fsf@f...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040122 Debian/1.6-1

K. Ari Krupnikov wrote:

> Client does presentation, server does business logic. Is that not in
> line with REST?

I'll leave it to the RESTafarians to answer that question, but sending one 
big chunk of information is nicely in line with the XML ideal of separating 
information from processing.  The server can send a big chunk of XML to the 
client without having to know anything about how the client works; the 
client can modify that information and send it back to the server without 
having to know anything about how the server works.  Of course, both sides 
have a negative option: the client can refuse the XML sent by the server or 
the server can refuse the modified XML returned by the client.

With an approach like this, the client can be anything from an autonomous 
agent to some Javascript in a browser to a sophisticated standalone GUI to a 
Perl script that fires up a text editor -- your server doesn't have to know 
(and neither do you, when you're writing the server).  Furthermore, the 
client's logic is in no way constrained: it can work with the information 
any way it wants, as long as the server is willing to accept what it sends 
back.  This is a very useful benefit, since few of us are smart enough to 
anticipate all the different ways people might work with any kind of 
information.

I agree that this kind of approach cannot work for all applications. 
Sometimes the user needs to edit information with strong dependencies on 
other information that the server needs to keep hidden; other times, the 
interdependencies are simply too complex to be covered by a single XML snapshot.

> It's not about reducing redundant traffic, it's about reducing
> redundant logic. One node should know how to do a process, be the
> final authority and bear the ultimate responsibility for that process.

Again, I agree that there are places that that approach makes sense, but one 
of the biggest benefits of XML is the ability to allow a potentially 
unlimited number of different processes to work with the same XML information.


All the best,


David

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    • From: David Megginson <dmeggin@a...>
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    • From: ari@c... (K. Ari Krupnikov)

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