Re: Service description value for hypermedia?

On Jun 16, 2005, at 3:15 PM, Mark Baker wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 02:56:44PM -0400, Marc Hadley wrote:
>
>>> But the code that a human would write to support Atom as a library
>>> (e.g. http://www.howdev.com/technologies/), would already provide an
>>> API analogous to the one you describe there.
>>>
>>>
>> Indeed, Atom is a bad example since its likely that folks will want
>> to write custom libraries for most programming languages to support
>> the format and protocol. Is that the case for all web applications
>> though...
>>
>
> I don't doubt that there might be exceptions, but I'm confident it's
> the general case, yes.
>
If you are correct and folks write custom libraries for all web  
applications for a variety of common programming languages then I'd  
agree with you: we don't need a web application description language  
and we can all go do something else instead. But, FWIW, I'm not  
convinced that this will happen and hence think that a standard  
format for describing such applications has some potential utility.

> Phew, I'm glad I got my point across.  I was having www-ws-arch
> flashbacks for a moment there. 8-) Thanks for hearing me out on this
> complex issue.
>
I was perhaps fortunate to miss out on the www-ws-arch discussions.

Cheers,
Marc.

---
Marc Hadley <marc.hadley at sun.com>
Business Alliances, CTO Office, Sun Microsystems.