Web Things, by Mark Baker

Phew, just made the deadline for DOA 2005.

Boy oh boy though, I had a couple of stinkers this year. These are papers that could have been written by high schoolers, I kid you not. Are some advisors evaluating their students by the number of papers submitted rather than accepted? I can’t think of any other reason for why people would want to put their names to some of the crap I was just forced to read.

It wasn’t all bad though. Of my eight papers (thank you PC chairs!), I had one excellent paper, and one pretty good one.

Catching up on some overdue responses …

In the context of the that Ben Carlye piece, Henry Story writes;

In my previous post I argued with Mark Baker that there is a difference between properties and object references. There is, but it is only a difference of emphasis. As I pointed out in RDF there is no fundamental distinction between both. They are both URIs.

What I meant was property instances, which is how the word “property” is commonly used in the context of Java Beans. For example, “name” is a property in RDF, but “Mark” would be a literal that, in the context of an assertion, is the value of an instantiation of the property. At least that’s the terminology that I’ve come to use, since I have some experience with explaining this to people (buy me a beer sometime, I’ve got stories).

I agree that the property has a URI in RDF/OWL, but the instantiation of that property never ever gets a URI in RDF (except via reification, which can safely be ignored).

“If one views a wiki as a state machine, then being able to do a redirect is effectively changing the programming of the application.”. Like I say, “Web services? You’re soaking in them!”
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

RSS/Atom & Microsoft. Quote: “These will not rival Soap/web services as a system for executing transactions.” Wanna bet?
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

Not browsers in general, my browser.

Let’s see what I’ve got going right now that distinguishes my
browsing experience from yours;

• my bookmarks
• my preferences
• my config params
• Greasemonkey and assorted scripts
• Platypus and assorted “scripts”
• my form textareas
• my plugins
• my currently open windows and tabs
• Web developer and its settings
• cache
• history

I’m certainly forgetting others.

It’s a big pain in my arse when I update something on my laptop, and then have to remember to replicate it on my PC at home. Big pain. I think the time is right to stuff a micro Web server into the browser to make all this data available via http URLs, so that I can point another copy of Firefox at it and have my experience cloned. Ok, maybe not the cache or history, but you get the point.

And while we’re at it, maybe we can find some other uses for the embedded server.

An essay 5+ years in the works. I pruned this down from an article I was working on that had become too detailed to get the point across.
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

Consider this and this. Coincidence?

The more I think about my main contribution to the RDF/XML Rec, the more I like its implications.

And congrats to the Atompub WG on Atom going, effectively, 1.0. I have mixed feelings about the syndication format; IMO, it should have reused existing formats, warts and all, in the spirit of paving the cowpaths. On the other hand, with Microsoft’s buy-in, its success now seems assured (though it will continue to trail RSS for years to come, it seems). I’m much more excited about the potential of the protocol though.

So it appears we’ve reached a new steady state in the ongoing Web vs. Web services debate. The following comment by Steve Maine describes it;

I do think there a lot of interesting ideas and scenarios enabled by RESTful usage of HTTP. I also think that WS-* solves a class of problems which RESTful HTTP does not handle well.

I’m glad my efforts, and those of other Web proponents, are having such an impact; it wasn’t that long ago that the Web wasn’t even considered a serious architectural option, and well known (but unnamed – you know who you are! 8-) Web services proponents were dismissing it as “for humans”.

So if you’re even a little bit surprised that REST has come this far over the past five years, believe me when I say that this steady state, isn’t; it’s just an inflection point. The RESTful stack solves a much wider variety of problems than most believe.

Remember, Web services are based upon a misunderstanding; if you want a loosely coupled, document oriented, distributed computing infrastructure, well, “You’re soaking in it!“.

More on this soon, at my Coactus blog.

Woot!
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]