Re: Service description value for hypermedia?

On Jun 17, 2005, at 11:59 PM, Stefan Tilkov wrote:

> When we do code generation in our MDA projects, we examine a few  
> use case implementations and look for similarities. If we find  
> them, refactoring them into code generation templates is one of  
> many options. The same might be true here: If convenient libraries  
> for Amazon, Atom, Google and whatever-RESTful-app share a lot of  
> code patterns that are not easily or efficiently put into a  
> framework, they might be candidates for code generation. The  
> description (or model) has to provide sufficient information to  
> drive the generator.

If within your 'system space' (be it the Web as a whole or some  
enterprise) you find such similarities, the REST- or Web-way to  
handle them is to standardize (globally or within enterprise context)  
message formats that capture them. It is an evolutionary process that  
'factors out' application semantics into message formats once they  
are recognized as 'similarities'.

Isn't that why there is RSS instead of doing blog machine processing  
with HTML?

Now that I look at it this way, I think people should start to  
collect 'enterprise
behavioural patterns' and express them as (suggested) message types.

What about UBL? Isn't UBL doing exactly this (for some part of  
enterprise context)?

Jan


>
> That said, I'm not at all sure that generating code for RESTful Web  
> APIs is a good idea -- but then again, I'm not sure the description  
> language itself is a good idea either.
>
> I find it hard, though, to imagine a useful Web description  
> language that would not also be usable for code generation.
>
>

________________________________________________________________________ 
____________________
Jan Algermissen, Consultant & Programmer                              
http://jalgermissen.com
Tugboat Consulting, 'Applying Web technology to enterprise IT'        
http://www.tugboat.de

Received on Friday, 17 June 2005 22:30:00 UTC