If you’ve heard me discuss Internet scale systems, you’ve certainly heard me talk about the necessity of interface constraints for those systems. What hit home with me today was that this term is probably unfamiliar to a lot of folks, so it could be of value to attempt to relate it to other things that they might be more familiar with.

What other names does “interface constraint” go by? “Component model” is one you might recognize. The value of component models like Java Beans derives entirely from the generality of the common interface they define. In the case of Beans, that interface isn’t complete (it’s more akin to a CRUD interface) but it remains useful.

Hmm, I wonder what a complete distributed component framework might look like? 8-)

I was flabbergasted to discover that I was the only subscriber to The Now Economy on Bloglines.

If you’re interested in a weblog that can discuss mesh networks in one post, and pasture management soon thereafter, and just generally cover the gambit of what decentralization and instant (modulo latency, of course 8-) gratification might mean to business in the coming years and decades, you should be subscribed.

Adam and Rohit are the brains behind KnowNow and mod-pubsub, and are both now at CommerceNet Labs.

Update; it seems Bloglines has a bad URI comparison algorithm, since I heard from somebody else that they see 9 subscribers, yet I still only see 3. This jives with two other things I’ve observed about the service; that it recommends feeds I’m already subscribed to, and that it doesn’t permit publication of URIs ending with “/” (which could very well explain all these problems, I think). Bah!

However, today’s web is not the end state of machine-to-machine communication.

Agreed. It’s not the end, it’s the beginning.

Omri Gazitt has a Web/REST gestalt moment and doesn’t even realize it. In talking about how WS-MetadataExchange might integrate with WS-Transfer, he writes;

In order to “dereference” the MetadataReference EPR, you may issue a “Get” message (which is defined in WS-MetadataExchange), but logically this is exactly the same operation as the WS-Transfer Get operation. Now it all starts to hang together…

Erm, yah, it does, doesn’t it? Of course, the Web has been getting things to hang together in exactly that manner (modulo s/EPR/URI, s/Get/GET) since day one.

Progress, in a regressive kinda way. I don’t know whether to jump for joy, or cry. 8-/

I did it, I converted from the blagg/ blosxom combo to Bloglines yesterday. A tiny awk script converted my blog list to OPML, and that was that. So far, so good, though Firefox seems to crash when the list of entries gets large.

I also wish that browsing the entries didn’t automatically mark them as all-read (side-effects on GET = bad!); a simple “done” button would be far better, I think.

I made my subscriptions public.

Further to my last post, I have a question that I’d like to ask Don, or any other Web services proponent that wants to chime in; what’s the simplest task that cannot be coordinated using a uniform interface?

Perhaps such a Q&A will help explain the 97% figure I mentioned.

Here’s a neat idea from Mike about how to bridge the divide between WS/SOA advocates, and Web folks;

What I’d really like to see here is the application of a well-known conflict management technique in which each side has to state the other side’s position, to the other’s satisfaction, before discussing the disagreement.

and;

So, why don’t the Web standards suffice for computer/computer interactions? People have been talking past each other on this topic for years now. How about it? Maybe Mark Baker could re-state his understanding of why Don Box thinks they don’t … and vice versa … before wrapping this permathread around the blogosphere one more time.

Hang on there … I thought my task was to attempt to state Don’s position, no? You seem to have done an adequate job at that when you stated “Don Box thinks they don’t suffice”, which I agree with. Though I could probably take a stab at explaining why Don believes this, it would really just be conjecture, and doesn’t seem to be required of me by this process.

And just to clarify, I don’t think “sufficiency” is necessarily the right test; on occasion, even me – yes, yours truly, the REST fanatic – has used non-uniform semantics. I just happen to think that uniform semantics suffice for, oh, say, 97% of stuff you might need to do when integrating applications over the Internet using document based messaging. “uniform” is the ultimate in generality, after all.