It’s nice to see Pat Helland join the REST/SOA conversation.
His first post is in a rather quisical, loose style that I hadn’t seen before, but that’s ok, I think I get what he’s talking about. The point seems to be summed up here;
Is the purchase-order (or even the line-item) a noun or a verb? I would argue is it syntactically a noun but semantically a verb.
Hmm. I’m quite certain it’s pure noun. If it were a verb, then it would only have a single-purpose – to order something – and wouldn’t be able to be archived, printed, translated, etc… which it clearly can. Obviously a message can only have one authoritative application-level verb, and if you’re using HTTP, then the request method is it.
I was chatting with a friend of mine who lives in London, and he happened to mention he was spending more time in Canada this year than he ever has. In addition to attending a conference, he was also planning to spend some vacation time here. “Where abouts?” I asked. Prince Edward Island. “Hey, that’s where we’re vacationing this year!” I said. “When?” We’re there the same week.
“So where are you staying?”
It turns out we’re in cottages separated by no more than 300 metres, in the smallest, least touristy county on the island. It’s a small island, but not that small.
Freaky.
So I had a quick look at Google Gears this morning. Unlike some, I do most definitely see value in supporting disconnected scenarios, not because I don’t see pervasive wired and wireless networks being the rule in the not-too-distant future – I do – but because I understand that networks are unreliable. That said, I do have some concerns about how Gears was put together.
My primary concern is that I’ve always felt that supporting offline use in existing browsers required more innovation of implementation rather than interface, whereas Gears is all about interface. What I mean by that is that I believe that a better, more easily deployable and usable solution would be for Mozilla itself to tweak the implementations of its HTTP stack, cache, and XMLHttpRequest object. Instead, Gears gives us new interfaces like LocalServer, which developers are supposed to use to check for valid cached representations before hitting up XHR: something XHR could very well do itself, largely transparently (I expect – haven’t considered all the backwards-compatibility issues).
Now, Gears could very well be something that was deployed for its ability to enable features today, because Google didn’t want to have to wait for HTML 5 (and its equivalent of client-side storage) to be deployed. And from that perspective it’s great (though requiring a plugin is a bit of a pain). I just hope that the Gears folks are talking with Hixie and Mozilla about where to draw the line here.