Werner likens REST to physics, in that each is a model of some
reality, not the reality itself. He writes;
Whether we use the REST model, or another model to be developed that appears to match it closer or from a different perspective, “the web” and other large scale distributed systems will continue to do “their thing”, whatever model we put on it. The distributed, decentralized, bottom-up, autonomous nature of the web, exhibits complex organic interactions, that are not driven by models or laws, just as that Nature is not driven by the laws of Physics.
Well said.
I would just add though, that there’s also a “metamodel” in play here
that shapes our models;
software architecture
(and while Roy’s view is just one of several, the other views aren’t that different).
Of course, this too is a model, and so falls under the domain of the same principle.
But I suggest that that so long as this metamodel remains useful, most models of the
architecture of the best behaved parts of a future Web, will be REST extensions, like
ARRESTED
or the (bulk of) the Semantic Web.
“Who’s going to do the proofreading?”. Good question; how about Wiki-fying it?
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My name’s in there somewhere!
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“The next time you’re contemplating major technological improvements to your existing architecture, look around for spare parts you already know”
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Tracking Internet growth; numbers, pointers, etc.. (by Mr. SIP)
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Congrats to everybody involved! I much prefer “Volume One” to “First Edition”, since the former implies it’s currently incomplete, which it clearly is (though still useful, of course)
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I was fearing
this article
being published for a while. The interview went terribly as
you can probably tell; I was sick, and had about 4 hours of sleep the
night before. Plus Greg was asking what I considered to be all the
wrong questions, which irked me, and forced me to try to steer to the
conversation to where I felt it should be going … with mixed results.
I also interpreted his questions as having a strong Web services bias,
which also bothered me. But to his credit, the article came off as
reasonably well balanced.
Savas picked up
on the article, and the praise I had for MEST in it. I did want to say
one thing about that though, that I didn’t have a chance to say in the
interview. While I like MEST as an architectural style, I believe that
the MESTful software that Savas and Jim would write would have considerable
issues integrating with the Web and other Internet based apps, largely
because they also believe in protocol independence. On the other hand,
since their assumed ProcessMessage semantic is practically semantically
identical to HTTP POST (and even SMTP DATA), a considerable amount of
that software may integrate well purely by accident! 8-) It’s only when
they start using – and trying to be independent of – non-ProcessMessage
like semantics, such as HTTP GET, PUT, or FTP STOR, that the integration
problems will arise.
In case you hadn’t noticed, I’d not been doing much travelling for
the past couple of years. In fact, my
drive to D.C. last month
was the first time I’d left the confines on the Canadian border in about
two years (in contrast to the 350K+ miles accumulated in the previous
three!). This was due to some issues I was having with the Canadian
government, in turn due to a case of mistaken identity; apparently there’s
some guy in Canada with my name and birthday(!!) who’s not quite so
law-abiding as yours truly!
I thought I was doing the smart thing in 2003 by applying for my
citizenship
instead of a
permanent resident card.
But, in retrospect, that turns out not to have been such a good decision. So I
finally applied for the card in addition to my citizenship, and I
received the card yesterday. Woohoo!
“my opinion is that real world adoption of web services will occur by radically simplifying the web services model”
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Some RESTful “Web service” goodness from IBM
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