Monthly Archives: September 2003

Playing the complexity shell game?

Edwin writes; Sean’s point is valid: unified interfaces are more scalable than typed objects. But the truth is that it is not enough. HTTP has 4 verbs: GET, PUT, DELETE, POST. MOM as 2 verbs: SEND and RECEIVE. Does it mean that integration is easy now. No! We have just move the complexity somewhere else.… Read More »

Sharecroppers and self-description

I just ran into Tim Bray’s “Sharecropper” blog entry. Tim writes; You’re not a sharecropper, especially not a sharecropper, if you’re building on the Web platform. If you can define your value-add as a series of interactions via a browser, or an interchange of XML messages, nobody can whip the land out from under you.… Read More »

Evangelism vs. Preaching

Werner thoughtfully relays some of his experiences in technology evangelism. This is interesting, much appreciated, and respectfully received, but alas, not completely relevant to my situation from my POV. The Web has already won. I’m just out there letting people know that. Many think that the Web needs Web services in order to enable machine… Read More »

RDF Forms Q&A

Seth Ladd asks; Not sure why the SemWeb needs a graph of POST data. Why not just POST a graph of RDF triples raw? Sounds good, because RDF Forms is for doing the latter, not the former. The issues that it tackles for that problem (at least for Container – Indexable is something different) are;… Read More »

Ray Lane; Are Web Services Really the Answer?

I caught this “blog” entry of Ray Lane’s via Google News today, and of course the title caught my eye. But I’ve been caught by titles before, and the article normally turns out to say, in effect, Yes, they are the answer. So this was a nice surprise; The software industry’s answer to all this… Read More »

RS-232 and transport vs. transfer

Werner comments on RS-232/SOAP and transport vs. transfer; But I do think Mark is pushing the limits by suggesting that the reads & writes on the rs232 registers are in reality similar to hidden REST-like HTTP GET & POST verbs. Well, I was simply suggesting an analogue existed, not what it was. But since he… Read More »

Dave Winer; links are important

Dave Winer writes; These people seriously need to take a refresher course in what the Web is about and how important links are and stop screwing around with them. So what’s this then?

More REST analogies from Sean

Sigh, I wish I could churn out well written analogies like Sean does. This time, it’s RS-232 and HTTP. Unfortunately, I don’t think this one will register with many Web services folks for one simple reason (that I’ve talked about before); the more general the interface, the harder it is to distinguish transport from transfer.… Read More »

RDF self-description issue

I don’t know why exactly – probably something to do with years of noodling on Web architecture – but I seem to have a knack for sniffing out self-description problems. So while working on RDF Forms (specifically the implicit intent section), I realized that RDF Schema is not self-descriptive; by virtue of not defining its… Read More »

Shallow adoption of Web services

Joyce Park writes; The fact that existing web services standards are widely perceived to be manipulated for private gain, never finished in a usable form, difficult to understand, and entirely failing to deliver interoperability — those would not be reasons for shallow adoption of course. No, of course not. 8-) Keep your eye on the… Read More »