Re: Why aren't most devices virtual web services?

On Thu, 14 Jan 2010, Kenton Varda wrote:
> 
> What I was imagining is that UAs would provide a function like:
>   urlToObject(url, interface);
> 
> "interface" would be a (URL to a?) definition of the interface, perhaps 
> in WebIDL or maybe in some equivalent language.  "url" points to the 
> RESTful API representing a resource implementing this interface.  
> urlToObject() returns an object implementing the WebIDL interface in 
> terms of the RESTful interface.  We then define some standard for this 
> mapping.
> 
> For the record, I personally don't have any problem with only providing 
> the REST API with no automatic conversion to something more friendly.  
> But if some people are worried that using XHR directly is too much of a 
> pain -- and making clients download helper libraries is too expensive -- 
> then maybe a standard urlToObject() would solve their problem.

That would certainly be interesting, though if we did that I expect people 
would want us to make it a generic mechanism that could apply to any 
interface. This is quite the can of worms, though, with things like 
dealing with synchronous APIs, etc.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 14 January 2010 22:41:10 UTC