Web Things, by Mark Baker

William discovers some of the subtleties of REST based development … without mentioning REST. 8-)
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I’ll be at JavaOne this year (for the first time since 2000!), arriving Saturday at noon, and leaving late Thursday. Drop me a line if you’re up for helping me feed my sushi habit, or just drop by the Justsystem xfy booth to say hi.

Good wireless Web thoughts from David Yach of RIM, relayed by Chris Justus
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Yup. This is also why the application/xml media type doesn’t mean what you think it means.
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Microformats get a (non-Technorati) home page
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Some problems transcend architectural style 8-); “They’re afraid that if they open up their business processes, their customers will realize just how little value they add.”
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Well, I guess I can say that NSERC is a client of mine now. 8-) Wow, that’s really open. What a big surprise it was to find that via Google!
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Oh joy, just as I’m about to head down that way.
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“as we talked about friends and food, I realized how absurdly insignificant TAG problems really are”. 8-)
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Don Smith (belatedly) wonders what it means to be document oriented;

To me, document-oriented (also called message-oriented or message-centric) is less about programming models or on-the-wire representations and more about the developer’s mindset. I recommend all Web service developers try to change the way they think about distributed solutions … especially if they’ve come from a DCOM, Remoting, etc. background. When you’re not thinking in terms of messages, certain inappropriate concepts can seep into your service. For example, object-oriented concepts like inheritence and polymorphism don’t belong in a service interface. Don’t get me wrong, there are ways to acheive the benefits these concepts provide, but it’s done differently. Developers with an RPC mindset also think in terms of object instances which don’t really apply to the messaging mindset. Lastly, RPC is largely dependent on the request-response exchange pattern. Messages can be one-way, pub-sub, solicit response, or request-response. Okay, one more thing to distinguish these mindsets … messaging scenarios are better equiped to handle async, store and forward, and queuing scenarios.

It amazes me that I can agree so emphatically with with what’s written above, yet also know that Don, like other Web services proponents, is missing the point; if you’re not doing state transfer, you’re just putting lipstick (XML) on a pig (RPC). How can you tell the difference? If there’s an operation name in your “document”, then you’re not document oriented.