[Baypiggies] Do you think this would be cool open source?

Shannon -jj Behrens jjinux at gmail.com
Thu May 7 22:14:04 CEST 2009


On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 1:01 PM, nar <nar at hush.com> wrote:
> Just my two cents on the RESTful aspect of the project.
> REST bugs me. The namespace is arbitrary and conforms to no real standards.
> While it's convenient from a design standpoint, it puts the onus on
> third-party developers to understand what to put in and what they get out of
> it, and that means having to read and understand documentation.
> If you use SOAP, it certainly incurs more overhead, it's a fat protocol --
> BUT, the ability to point a SOAP proxy object at some WSDL and have it
> automatically understand what functions are available to it and their
> prototypes makes it so much more attractive to third party developers. In
> terms of security, there's a variety of strategies you can utilize that are
> part of the protocol rather than tacking them on at the end by hand.
> I think the concept is a great one though! REST definitely is 'easy' to
> write, and probably easier for casual developers to utilize, but I prefer
> SOAP because it's consistent.

(I replied to Glen off list.)

REST bugs me too ;)  Since my main job at my last two companies has
been to write RESTful Web services, I feel justified in my opinion.

I've written a lot about REST on my blog, including a review of the
book "RESTful Web Services":
http://jjinux.blogspot.com/search/label/rest.  However, rather than
restate everything I wrote on my blog, let me copy just one post:

====
Web: REST Verbs

I find it curious that REST enthusiasts insist on viewing the world
through the five verbs GET, HEAD, PUT, POST, and DELETE. It reminds me
of a story:

Back in the early '80s, I worked for DARPA. During the height of the
Cold War, we were really worried about being attacked by Russia. My
team was charged with designing a RESTful interface to a nuclear
launch site; as far as technology goes, we were way ahead of our time.

Anyway, I wanted the interface to be "PUT /bomb". However, my
co-worker insisted that it should be "DELETE /russia". One of my other
buddies suggested that we compromise on something more mainstream like
"POST /russia/bomb".

Finally, my boss put an end to the whole fiasco. He argued that any
strike against the USSR would necessarily be in retaliation to an
attack from them. Hence, he suggested that it be "GET /even", so
that's what we went with.

You have to understand, back then, GETs with side effects weren't yet
considered harmful.
====

Happy Hacking :-D
-jj


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