Re: Late binding

Martin,

On Wed, Jun 26, 2002 at 12:41:29PM -0700, Martin Chapman wrote:
> Now to comment on Mark's last point. I think I hear you saying is what
> the web does is define get and post methods on all "objects". If in this
> context,if  http://www.cherontexaco.com/foo/bar offers baz, goo and
> gurgle these are somehoe encoded in the get or post.

No, I'm saying that baz, goo, and gurgle are not exposed as methods at
all by that service.  The only methods that are exposed are GET, PUT,
POST, etc..  The functions that baz, goo, and gurgle perform, can, in
most cases, be implemented as a hidden side effect of POST.  The hard
part here is in being able to enable the client (human or machine) to
form an expectation about what that side effect might be.  HTML forms
satisfy the needs of human users in this respect, and RDF satisfies
the needs of machines.

I talked about this here;

http://www.markbaker.ca/2002/05/GettingStuffDoneOnTheWeb/

> At the web level it
> doesn't care. But when bar recieves the get/post it has to decode the
> contents and "route" the request to the implementation of baz, goo, or
> gurgle. If one of these doesn't exist the request fails. All that is
> happening here is that we have pushed the brittleness up one level. You
> *cannot* avoid the problem   that there may be a request for a server
> function/feature/method that does not exist.

You can't entirely avoid it, but you can change the nature of the
problem by limiting the number of methods you expose, and using the
ones you do expose to be able to bootstrap extended agreement.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile (formerly Planetfred)
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.               distobj@acm.org
http://www.markbaker.ca        http://www.idokorro.com

Received on Wednesday, 26 June 2002 21:19:02 UTC