Re: URI Template experience

Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> On May 18, 2009, at 12:25 PM, Joe Gregorio wrote:
> 
>> It's been a while since the URI Template draft has been updated, and
>> in the interim
>> there has been some implementation experience:
>>
>>    http://blog.springsource.com/2009/03/08/rest-in-spring-3-mvc/
>>    http://code.google.com/p/uri-templates/wiki/Implementations
>>
>> In the intervening months two things have happened:
>>
>> 1. In all the URI Template examples I've seen, only the simplest case
>> {foo} has
>>    even been shown.
>>
>> 2. I've been repeatedly asked about "going the other way", i.e.
>> parsing URIs
>>    based on templates.
>>
>> This leads to two questions:
>>
>> 1. Are there any real-world uses of the more complex URI Templates, or
>> is {foo} enough?
>>
>> 2. *If* the syntax is simplified to {foo} there is an opportunity to
>> support the parsing
>>    case, ala http://bitworking.org/projects/1812/wsgidispatcher.html
>>     Is that of interest to anyone?
> 
> Hi Joe,
> 
> Your question implies that the features in the current draft are
> somehow dependent on the extent to which the current draft has
> been implemented in the wild.  I think that is backwards, since
> the draft received many comments and did not change as a result.
> For example,
> 
> http://www.w3.org/mid/07109D44-233D-42F3-ACB0-56B4A6562903@gbiv.com


Much of which I stole and stuck into
http://www.aminus.org/rbre/shoji/shoji-draft-01.txt, which is being used
to run http://parachutes.org/api/browser for one. Why not push ahead
with that? Given the dearth of complexity in implementations of URI
Templates, I'd much prefer the simpler syntax you proposed there. Make
it simple enough, and regexes for dispatching on the server fall out
quite nicely.


Robert Brewer
fumanchu@aminus.org