- From: Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>
- Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 07:25:25 -0500
- To: www-tag@w3.org
Hi, Some "conversational" systems, like those built with VoiceXML, reuse some of REST's constraints, but not all; they are explicitly stateful. This isn't inherrently a bad thing, of course, because as has been pointed out, voice apps *can* benefit from such an interaction model. So you suck up statefulness, and take the bad (lowered reliability and scalability) with the good (suitability). If there's an issue buried here somewhere, it may be that it is unclear to many to what extent the various constraints of REST are responsible for the "Web-ishness" of some system (and inherit the extreme interconnectivity of the Web, etc..), and at what point, while picking and choosing between these constraints, would a system be considered not part of the Web? Or in other words, what is the minimum set of architectural constraints that will make a system Web-like? FWIW, my current view is that two constraints are critical; the uniform interface, and identification of resources. In this respect, I think that VoiceXML systems are "on the Web" because they use both constraints, whereas Web services are not on the Web, because they - at least as currently implemented and specified - use neither. MB -- Mark Baker. Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA. http://www.markbaker.ca Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis
Received on Tuesday, 18 March 2003 07:21:01 UTC