Re: Role of operations?

Hey David,

On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 10:05:48PM -0700, David Orchard wrote:
> 
> I think that MarkB is saying that specifying the input and output
> parameters for GET/PUT/POST is violating the uniform operations.  

Not at all (?? where'd that come from?  RDF Forms supports exactly
that! 8-).  I'm just saying that the Py* libraries aren't good
examples for code generation because they hide the uniform interface
with non-uniform API calls (like "searchByISBN").

> I strongly disagree.  I think that one can have uniform operations that
> are "strongly-typed".  At least one case is validation.  

Agreed, although as I've mentioned I think it's a bit of a slippery
slope.  But for some applications, a short trip down that slope will be
manageable.

> Another case is the ability to describe the xml documents returned and
> which parts are hypermedia allows very interesting RESTful choreography.
> For example, Atom specifies that a POST Entry to the "POSTEntry" URI
> results in a document that has a URI for the "EDITEntry" interface
> (which I think is GET,PUT, DELETE).  This association between two URIs
> can only be done if somehow the URI in the POSTEntry response is tied to
> the EDITEntry interface.  An ideal thing for a Web Description Language.

Strongly agreed.  That's a forms language use case, since that possible
state transition is discovered at runtime.  That's what REST's
"hypermedia as the engine of application state" constraint is all about.

Mark.

Received on Thursday, 16 June 2005 05:32:45 UTC