hold up

I've just been reading huge chunks of archived messages again, and 
there's a consistent phrase coming out that's just flat out wrong.

   "a representation of the resource"

that's not what HTTP and the specs say, a representation is a 
representation of the current or intended state of a resource. not a 
representation of the resource.

A resource is a stateful abstraction whose state is managed by an 
abstract protocol, the abstract protocol is realized via various machine 
protocols (such as http) which manage the state of the resource via 
messages and pass full or partial representations of the 
current/intended state in various lexical forms.

Thus, an http/rest resource can *only* be something that has the 
property of having it's state (even partially) managed via a transfer 
protocol, something in the realm of the machine.

the weather in london cannot be a rest resource, unless you can 
represent or manipulate it's current state via HTTP, which you can't, 
you can only represent or manipulate information about the weather in 
london with a transfer protocol.

Received on Saturday, 26 February 2011 09:28:32 UTC