RE: Proposed replacement text for Section 1.6

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org] 
> Sent: Sunday, January 25, 2004 3:41 PM
> To: Champion, Mike
> Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Proposed replacement text for Section 1.6
> 
> I don't want to get into value judgements here because I've 
> had to do RPC-like stuff on occasion.  I'm not saying that 
> RPC doesn't exist on the Web either, only that it's extremely 
> uncommon, and so much so that it can effectively be ignored 
> for the purposes of an architectural examination of the 
> relationships between elements.
> 
> Consider that there's O(1000000000) Web resources which use 
> GET[1], probably something like O(1000000) which use POST[2], 
> and just O(100) which use RPC[3].

Hmm.  Well, I suppose we could investigate this if there is some future
venue to continue the "is the Web really RESTful" discussion.  For what very
little it's worth, using the xmethods registry to measure "RPC on the Web"
seems to greatly underestimate its prevalence IMHO.  For example,
essentially every Weblog client that uses some XML-RPC interface to update
its server ought to be counted, and there must be hundreds of thousands if
not millions of them.  Then there are all the "hand-coded RPC" sites that
have JavaScript or whatever calling server-side code via CGI; there have to
be tens or hundreds of thousands????  

It would definitely be something that a researcher could find lots and lots
of data on by spidering the Web, but it's tangential to the question at
hand.   If someone has done any real research along these lines that the WSA
WG should be aware of in drafting the stakeholders perspectives on REST,
SOA, the Web for the Web services architecture, by all means give us a
pointer ASAP.

Received on Sunday, 25 January 2004 16:13:56 UTC