RE: Role of operations?

The discovery of the actual URI for the EDITEntry is done at runtime,
but the fact that *some URI* will be created can be used at design time.


The possible state change is discovered at design time, but the actual
state change for that instance of an entry is discovered at run time.  

There's nothing wrong with even having the actual instance URI in the
description language.  Walmart could say "for you customer Mark, I'm
going to give you your own WDL and it says that you can edit your user
info at URI foo".  Now why they would duplicate a URI in the WDL and in
the instance is up to them, and that case means that there has to be a
1:1 relationship between the description language instance and the URIs.

Hypermedia is about URIs, that's the "hyper" part.  That doesn't
constrain to when the URIs are described or discovered.

Cheers,
Dave

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 10:33 PM
> To: David Orchard
> Cc: public-web-http-desc@w3.org
> Subject: 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").
> 

Ok...  gotcha..  glad we're on the same page.

> > 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 15:47:31 UTC