Doug Kaye responds. It seems we did miscommunicate. I like to tweak my terminology on occasion, to try to blur distinctions for my readers that I believe are artificial, such as that between objects and resources. It came back to bite me this time it seems. I’ll be more careful in the future.
Doug writes;
I continue to believe that dynamic documents, such as those which evolve during a complex business process, are best communicated through non-REST style interfaces.
Which is weird, because I’d say that is what REST does best. A URI is just an identifier. I could use one to identify some instance of a business process, and at any point, anybody with that URI could invoke GET to retrieve a document which represented the state of the process. As the process makes progress (in any direction 8-), subsequent GETs will return different results representing the current state. I’m not sure how else to handle viewing dynamic processes, other than transferring some mobile agent pickled with its state, and then prodding the agent for the info, but I don’t think Doug’s talking about that. Hmm…
no comment until now