Re: SOAP & REST

Yves,

> > All of the above.  The URI is opaque.  In the absence of other
> > information (i.e. before invoking GET), given only the URI, nobody knows
> > what it does.
> 
> Yes but usually you are going to a specific URI because you know that you
> may find the information you need. Either you go to a company web site,
> you you ask a search engine. In both case you are doing discovery to
> locate the resource that will provide the service you want (give you the
> right information).
> It is the same fot the multiplication example, if you just have the URI
> you can't know that it will actually multiply two number, nor the format
> on the other side (it may well be base16).
> 
> > was a multiplier.  Machines can work exactly the same way, though
> > obviously they'd need a machine processable assertion of the fact that
> > the service was a multiplier, returned on the GET.
> 
> Yes, and a user will find this assertion on search engines. So the
> processing model is roughly the same.

We are in complete agreement on this point, assuming that by that last
sentence you were referring to the regular Web vs. Semantic Web, and
not RPC.

So if that's the case, and I know that a resource is a multiplier via
some assertion, why does it also need to have a multiply method?  Why
won't GET suffice?

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.      mbaker@planetfred.com
http://www.markbaker.ca   http://www.planetfred.com