Methods on resources... am I abusing resources ?

Dear TAGgers,

I would like to request comments on the following practice which 
appears to me as good but which seems to be barely done by the current 
web-services practices:

• Following "The Architecture of the Web", a resource is at least 
something a representation of which can be "GET"(ted).

• one should also be able to "operate" on a resource:
   - Methods on resources could, thus be acted upon using a POST (or 
something else?). In turn, they can create new resources, returned as 
URIs, of course.
   -  And some resource representations (that can be "GET"(ted)) should 
document how this can be done.

Doing so, I seem to be (mis)using resources as objects...
I am unclear how "evil" this is...

This is somewhat similar to WSRF  (http://www.globus.org/wsrf/), but 
WSRF does not declare anything about "GET"ting a resource's 
representation (and sort of carefully avoids it, I think, because of 
the GRID's massive data intents).

Similarly to WSRF this looks to be very appropriate to describe 
stateful "web-services" or "resources" (including the ability, 
probably, to "HEAD" the resource in order to check a state change).

Reading about REST services, I would have expected such a practice to 
have emerged but that seems to have evaporated... even the Semantic Web 
Services group, whose RESTful-services interest is declared, seemed to 
be only partially interested by WSRF.

paul

Received on Tuesday, 30 November 2004 16:06:41 UTC