Web Things, by Mark Baker

Jan Algermissen, Topic Map and REST fanatic, relaunches his weblog. Subscribed!
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USB-SD. Gadget design at its finest. Wow.
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“How do web services (particularly WSDL/SOAP/UDDI) fit into this?” They don’t. In order to discover things, you need to get at the data behind an interface, and in order to to do that you need to know the interface. With Web services there are an infin
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As Stefan mentioned, we got together for dinner while I was in Dusseldorf at a Compound Document Formats WG WG meeting last week.

I only had my crappy cell phone camera with me, so please excuse the quality of these shots of our meals;

Stefan’s Pork Knuckle:

Mark’s Deer Ragout:

Can you make out the brussel sprouts and spaetzle? Mmm..

On the “Convert Stefan to a REST believer” front, I think I made good progress. I used to believe that email was a better medium for these exchanges since I could take the time to fully understand the other party, and formulate a detailed response. But just a few minutes of back-and-forth on the (more or less) transport vs. transfer issue, and I had him going “Hmmm…”. Perhaps at some point he’ll elaborate on that, and how much of a nuisance a single bit can be. 8-)

Anyhow, Dusseldorf was quite the amazing city. I didn’t have much in the way of expectations visiting there, believing it was largely industrial like Frankfurt. But I was quite wrong. It’s very affluent and cosmopolitan, and its beautiful old town area has the largest pedestrian mall I’ve seen in Europe.

I also wasn’t going to get down to Dusseldorf without visiting the famous German wine region of Mosel, home of, IMO, the world’s best white wine. So, arriving early, I did the 3 hour trip, both ways, via taxi, train and bus, to Bernkastel. I was glad I did too, as the day was gorgeous, and the wine fantastic. In particular, the 2003 vintage from Dr. Loosen (pic) was out of this world! We did a 2003 flight from each of their first growth vineyards, and all were of exceptional quality and full of “Mosel-nature”; sweet, lucious fruit, with citrous and mineral. Curiously, the offering from Dr. Pauly wasn’t nearly so whistle-whetting, which probably had something to do with the abundance of Kabinetts that they turned out, while my preference – and Dr. Loosen’s speciality – is their Spatleses and Ausleses. I’d also never seen this before, but Loosen also offers a “Goldkapsel” (gold cap) Auslese which is Auslese without any botrytis affected fruit; pure sweet mosel with none of the sometimes-off-putting and always-tastebud-killing botrytis flavour (epitomized by Sauternes). It had all the fruity sweetness of an Auslese with a Beerenauslese price, weee! 8-) The gold cap is their own means for labelling it, though the practice of making the wine has been recently picked up by other VDP member producers.

Some more phone-quality pictures in a yet-to-be-properly-setup gallery are available.

If it’s in a protocol stack, it’s a protocol.

I forgot to mention that I proposed an issue to the TAG, as the WS-Addressing WG refused to accept it.

This is an interesting one, since it’s not so much a test of URIs vs. EPRs (though that one will be entertaining!) as much as it is a test whether the TAG agrees that protocol independence – where a SOAP message’s semantics are independent of the underlying protocol – is counter to Web architecture.

I’ve been meaning to do this for years now, but after a recent reminder about how poorly understood state is, I decided to make some time.

It’s no where near complete, as you can tell, but I think there’s enough there to be useful to a lot of people. So I present to you, the State FAQ!

Of course, like any decent FAQ, it’s on a Wiki, so let’s work together to make it better. Cheers!

I’ll be hanging out in Sunnyvale Jan 21-23, with the morning of the Friday (21st), and the whole day Saturday, free.

Who wants to get together?

One thing’s for sure, I’ll be in the mood for a serious sushi outing. Ottawa’s got to be the worst place on Planet Earth for it; no sushi-only establishments, and of the better Japanese restaurants, they don’t do omakase, and the sushi’s only barely passable!

Update; I suppose I should update this to say that Totoya is the first decent Sushi place I’ve found in Ottawa. It’s a bit on the expensive side, but their fish is by far the best I’ve had in town, and rivals meals I’ve had in Tokyo and Vancouver. Sushi 88 is nice as well; good variety and quite affordable, but not quite as tasty as Totoya.

Another good article from Joe. I left a comment, but wanted to repost it here, since I think this is the most succinct description I’ve offered for explaining this critical point.

Nice job again Joe, but I think you’re a little (and I do mean *little* 8-) too rough on the existing service when you say “This is an RPC protocol trying to run over HTTP, and that misalignment is where the problems arise”. With the ListMyQueues and Read operations, putting them in a URI such that a GET returns the data *is* perfectly RESTful. This is because when in URI form, the effective operation – that which the client asks be done, and expects is done when receiving a successful response – is GET, not ListMyQueues.

It’s very(!) easy to misunderstand this point; the same point which is also, I believe, the principle impediment which prevents proponents of document oriented Web services from realizing that REST and the Web is what they’ve been trying to build.

After a two-plus year hiatus, I’m returning to active duty at the W3C. Justsystem, my principle client, has just joined as full members. I’m now a member of the Compound Document Formats WG, which shouldn’t come as any surprise given the problem space tackled by xfy, the technology we previewed in November.