Re: Summing up on visibility(?)

On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 11:25:56AM +0000, Miles Sabin wrote:
> The question for me then becomes: are the a priori knowledge 
> requirements for the REST architecture more, equally or less demanding 
> than those for the alternatives?

That's one perfectly valid way to look at it, but we already went down
that path and couldn't reach agreement.

Would you agree that another perfectly valid way to look at it would
be as I said before; "Suffice it to say that this is an alternate means
of doing the same thing, while respecting the uniform interface
constraint."

If we can agree to that, then we know that this alternate solution
exhibits the properties induced by the uniform interface constraint,
whereas the other solution does not ... unless of course the
architectural style used by the other solution consists of other
constraints that replace those properties (does it? It doesn't appear
to)

I chose not to respond to the "same knowledge" part of your message,
because we've covered that ground, and besides, for the purpose of this
thread I only wanted to get to the conclusion that visibility is
improved in REST so that we can get some text about that into the WSA
doc.

> At this point the choice between REST and the alternatives becomes more 
> pragmatic and empirical. Given a particular distributed application, 
> does it map naturally onto a REST architecture or onto something else? 
> Do tools provide better support for the REST solution or something 
> else? Is the REST programming model better understood by developers or 
> are they more comfortable with something else?

I believe that the choice of architectural style should *always* be
pragmatic.  I also firmly believe that a large degree of visibility is a
required property of all Internet-scale systems.  So I consider
rejecting the current WSA on that grounds to be a very pragmatic
decision.  That doesn't mean that other architectural styles may not be
more appropriate in some situations, only that WSA ain't one of them.
8-)

Thanks.

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

Received on Friday, 10 January 2003 10:37:17 UTC