Re: Use Cases

On 6/7/06, Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> wrote:
> On Jun 7, 2006, at 10:59 AM, Jan Algermissen wrote:
>
> > except for HTTP and any shared MIME types, everything in a RESTful
> > system is discovered at runetime.
>
> Who said?  I disagree entirely.  Just because the SOAP-heads blew
> WSDL doesn't mean that there's anything intrinsically wrong with the
> notion of declaring a REST interface.

I agree.  REST says very little (in fact, nothing explicitly) about
design time vs. runtime.  Via the hypermedia constraint, it does quite
severely restrict how applications make forward progress, and that's
something we need to be aware of here.  But it certainly doesn't
preclude everything being discussed on this list.

HTTP already provides some "design time" information too.  OPTIONS
responses, for example.  The Allow response header.  Probably other
things.

>  It would help with things like
> tooling and testing and automation, too.

I think that's part of what we're trying to determine.  Having built a
handful of machine-to-machine Web based systems, none of which needed
a "description language" (nor would they have benefitted from one,
IMO), I'm skeptical that there's a big enough problem here that
requires a new standard (rather than reusing, say, XForms).  But I'm
happy to be convinced otherwise.

> > IMHO, HTTP and the shared understanding of a MIME type *and* the
> > intention of the client developer at design time are sufficient to
> > actually implement the client side - if the design time
> > expectations do not hold at runtime this will be detected at
> > runtime. (I do not consider this a problem since there cannot be a
> > design time constraint on the runtime in a distributed system
> > anyhow so you allways need to check and expect insifficient data)
>
> My experience differs.  When building a heterogeneous distributed
> system, I'd like to have a contract that operates at a higher level
> than a MIME type, so that when things break, you can finger-point
> constructively.  -Tim

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by that.

Mark.

Received on Friday, 9 June 2006 02:18:31 UTC