Architectural interaction

On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 10:49:24AM -0500, Champion, Mike wrote:
> For the Outlook-blissfully-oblivious, Chris emphasized 

Ah ...

I even checked the archive, figuring there might be an HTML
multipart/alternate, but there wasn't.  Not sure what happened there.

> "The trade-off, though, is that a uniform interface degrades efficiency,
> since information is transferred in a standardized form rather than one
> which is specific to an application's needs. The REST interface is designed
> to be efficient for large-grain hypermedia data transfer, optimizing for the
> common case of the Web, but resulting in an interface that is not optimal
> for other forms of architectural interaction."
> 
> > It's not like Web services are a replacement for telnet or the
> > Quake protocol, which would be examples of different forms of
> > architectural interaction.
> 
> Hmm, at the risk of displaying my apostasy towards RESTifarianism, I *would*
> think that programs communicating fine-grained structured data over an
> intranet, optimizing for the common case of B2B/EAI or RPC, is a different
> form of architectural interaction than coarse-grained hypermedia over the
> Web.

Yes, it is, but that misses the point.

One can observe any system to discover what form of architectural
interaction it uses, and conclude that it isn't coarse grained data
transfer and therefore REST doesn't apply.  But that's not the same as
saying that coarse grained data transfer isn't an appropriate style of
architectural interaction for the *problem*.

> One *can* do this, of course, but we are not going to say that people
> *must* do it.
> 
> I think the quote from Roy Fielding was very apt for our purposes:  it
> emphasizes that this is all about optimzation and tradeoffs, not fundamental
> truths.  

Of course.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis

Received on Thursday, 19 December 2002 00:55:19 UTC