A couple of
interesting
developments
out of
Grand Central.
These guys have got it going on. Their network is largely state transfer based; not
REST, but not far from it either, and “like it” in the
right way.
At least they’ve (mostly) got past the API-centric view of the world espoused
by Web services proponents (yes, even for “document centric” Web services), despite paying
lip
service
to WSDL.
Plus they’ve got a
Semantic Web proponent
as
CTO.
Look for more good things from GC (and from third parties on their platform) in the coming months and years.
An HTTP proxy that determines when I’m POSTing weblog comments (or other
things, for that matter), and provides an RSS feed for them.
References;
Probably the most interesting thing that I learned about
RDF
on my last project was that resource typing (via the use of
rdf:type)
was over-rated. As a long time distributed objects weenie, I naturally
had this vision of resources (objects, if you will) with uniform
interfaces (what else?), but also with types orthogonal to those
interfaces (duh, since the interfaces are fixed) . You can’t
have an object without a type can you?
Then reality hit. Despite the fact that I had actually speced out a
type ontology for the project, and educated everybody about it,
almost none of our RDF processing software actually checked the rdf:type
triple! Apparently, if it
walked like a duck, and quacked like a duck,
then by golly, for all intents and purposes it was a duck! That
was very liberating. I knew the moment I realized this, what had happened;
I simply had overlooked what was important to the recipient of the documents, the data.
rdf:Description; not just a place holder for the lazy.
rdf:type; in many cases, YAGNI