Web Things, by Mark Baker

According to Radovan anyhow 8-)

Everyone programs in something different, so let’s just do protocol-based integration, where we will just agree on the format of the messages we are going to exchange over the wire.

I think this is the thing some ‘REST fundamentalists’ are still missing…

No, I think we get that. Or at least we get that it’s a critical part of the solution. This is why HTTP 1.1 is as well specified as it is (not that it doesn’t have issues, of course). The problem is that the format is only one part of the solution. The other part are the semantics of the messages, something that HTTP also specifies, but SOAP doesn’t … not that it should though, as it can always inherit them from the underlying protocol.

Right from the spec, we have this example of an EPR;

<wsa:EndpointReference xmlns:wsa="..." xmlns:fabrikam="...">

   <wsa:Address>http://www.fabrikam123.example/acct</wsa:Address>
   <wsa:ReferenceProperties>
       <fabrikam:CustomerKey>123456789</fabrikam:CustomerKey>
   </wsa:ReferenceProperties>
   <wsa:ReferenceParameters>

       <fabrikam:ShoppingCart>ABCDEFG</fabrikam:ShoppingCart>
   </wsa:ReferenceParameters>
</wsa:EndpointReference>

Somebody please tell me why on earth that isn’t a URI? You know, something like;

http://www.fabrikam123.example/acct/123456789?ShoppingCart=ABCDEFG

Note to self; avoid using an HTTP header named “Status” in Webware, since apparently it’s reserved for holding the in-memory equivalent of the response code.

Ack.

What’s the best Python Web app framework, or should I just go back to Jython and javax.servlet?

I went to high-school with Hans, and had a big crush on his sister Denise. Though he was a year ahead of me, we were always hanging out in the computer room together with the other jean-jacket wearing geeks.
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Congrats Rael!! Well deserved.
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One of the nice things about being a critic of the current approach to Web services, is that the infighting amoungst the players had a chilling effect on standardization efforts, which made my job – of keeping the W3C as free from this stuff as possible – easier. Unfortunately, today, everybody seems to have come together for the worst spec of them all; WS-Addressing is now a W3C submission.

SOAP, I liked very much, just not how people were/are using it.

WSDL, I didn’t like because of the bad practice it encouraged, but I felt that it might have a role to play.

But this monstrosity actively causes harm by not using URIs as EPRs. That part of the spec has no redeeming qualities, except that it represents an attempt on behalf of the authors to Do The Right Thing regarding addressing (i.e. standardize it). Unfortunately, those authors fail to recognize that we’ve already got a perfectly good identification spec.

Update; P.S. yes, I understand than an EPR has a mandatory wsa:Address, but that doesn’t change anything, as any identifying information in the SOAP envelope is necessarily in conflict with the HTTP Request-URI. One endpoint per message, please.

A vision of things to come; personal servers, event servers, REST, RDF, …
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Sean highlights Reinout van Rees’s Zen moment

Awesome, another recruit!

I just want to add that I think it’s important to recognize that “getting it” requires a Zen moment. For everybody I know who came from a CORBA/DCOM-like distributed systems background, but now understands the Web, serious mental model rewiring occurred. If you haven’t had that rewiring, you don’t (yet) get the Web.

A good one from Bill Grosso on what the year 2009 will bring, including a couple of bang-on comments about the Web/Web-arch
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Adam writes;

The original impetus behind XML, at least as far as I was concerned back in 1996, was a way to exchange data between programs so that a program could become a service for another program. I saw this as a very simple idea. Send me a message of type A and I’ll agree to send back messages of types B, C, or D depending on your A. If the message is a simle query, send it as a URL with a query string. In the services world, this has become XML over HTTP much more than so called “web services” with their huge and complex panoply of SOAP specs and standards.

Wow! I actually had a weblog entry written, that questioned whether Adam’s transition away from a Web services company, and towards a Web company, might have had something to do with him “seeing the light” regarding REST vs. SOA. I decided not to post it because it was pure conjecture. But it seems my gut feel was partly right. However, he also adds;

Why? Because it is easy and quick.

Which is true, but not a very satisfying answer I’d say. Why is it easy and quick? Anyhow, I’m sure Adam will have lots of time to mull that question over in his work at Google. I look forward to seeing what cool stuff he comes up with there.