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Re: Web Services - what is the alternative? (was TAG on HLink)

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• Subject: Re: Web Services - what is the alternative? (was TAG on HLink)
• From: Matt Gushee <mgushee@h...>
• Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 00:57:25 -0600
• In-reply-to: <3A1A5205-D105-11D6-A06B-003065F62CD6@w...>
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• Reply-to: Matt Gushee <mgushee@h...>
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On Wed, Sep 25, 2002 at 09:05:43PM -0700, Bill Humphries wrote:
> On Wednesday, September 25, 2002, at 06:59 PM, Rob Griffin wrote:
> 
> >The first one accesses my mobile (cell) phone provider's web site 
> >using HTTP
> >and HTTPS to use a facility they offer where you can send an SMS from 
> >a web browser.
> >This involved grovelling through HTML to find the form tags to 
> >determine what
> >fields I needed to send and sniffing the data sent on the connection 
> >to see
> 
> However, I don't think that the example is a canonical example of a 
> REST application.

Certainly not! Though I can't claim to be a REST guru, I've been lurking
on the REST mailing list for several months, and I don't think anyone in
that community would advocate building applications based on
machine-processing HTML.
 
> If your SMS provider's interface had the capablity to 
> return status and error messages in XML, then your integration would 
> had been easier

That may be useful, but AFAIK it's not RESTful. HTTP provides a rich set
of error codes. The advantage of using them (as with the HTTP request
methods) is that they are standardized through a widely-deployed
protocol--and one whose various implementations are by and large
faithful to the spec. That substantially reduces the amount of
application-specific semantics you have to deal with, making for
loosely-coupled, easily interchangeable components.

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee@h...
http://www.havenrock.com/

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• References:
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    • From: Rob Griffin <Rob.Griffin@o...>
  • Re: Web Services - what is the alternative? (was TAG on HLink)
    • From: Bill Humphries <bill@w...>

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