Web Things, by Mark Baker

“but really, can’t we use technology for better things” Like porn?
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Damn, I’ve been in a foul mood recently. Finally, Web services folks are admitting (not in so many words, of course) many of their mistakes – mistakes that I’ve been pointing out to them since 1999 – and I’m not able to celebrate. *sigh*

The job hunt hasn’t been going well. Interviews inevitably end up on the topic of Web services, where I’m basically given a couple of minutes to make my case… which, as you might expect given how long it’s taken the industry (or at least a particularly bright subset thereof) to come this far, doesn’t go well. Do I spend 40 seconds on software architecture, another 40 on desirable properties of multi-agency network-based systems, and wrap up with REST vs. SOA/WS? Or do I hazard a guess that the interviewer is familiar with the first two and commit all two minutes to the latter? Of course, it doesn’t matter either way, because there’s no chance in hell of successfully summarizing 7 years of arguments into 2 minutes. Couldn’t these companies at least have somebody interview me who’s familiar with this debate? Most of the ones I’ve talked with have people who were part of that debate, ferchrisakes! *sigh*

On the upside, I have managed to craft quite an elevator pitch involving getRealtimeStockQuote, getStockQuote, and GET. But even if I manage to get that point across (which does happen), nobody’s yet managed to convert that minor epiphany to a broad appreciation of the uniform interface. I watch their eyes, and you can see the exact moment where they give up trying to figure it out for themselves, and instead fallback to the familiarity of “conventional wisdom”. *sigh*

Anyhow, despite things not going well with most of the 14 companies I’ve interviewed with, it looks like my quest might finally be coming to an end (the good kind 8-). Stay tuned.

Tags: soa, webservices, rest.

(Doh, I lost this one in my queue, hence its tardiness)

It’s too bad his comments are gone, because this “response” to his piece on microformats doesn’t exactly warrant a separate blog entry. But here it is anyway.

Regarding extensibility, I think the “middle name” issue Dave has is really with the vCard format, from whence hCard inherits its descriptive semantics (i.e. vCard has no concept of “middle name”, only “additional names” – hCard has support for this via the *-Name classes, though I admit it’s underspecified). IMO, the microformat approach in general, has a very good extensibility story; extension classes are ignored, while extended content is ignored by automata, but rendered to humans. Plus there’s also a nice hack for cases where machine-processability gets in the way of human-friendliness; “display: none” in CSS.

In fact, thinking about it some more now, I think the bulk of the innovation in (and coolness of) microformats is exactly that it works within the constraints of existing extensibility points in a pervasively deployed format. Anybody can invent a new format, but it takes genius to reuse an existing one.

Tags: microformats, html, css.

I’m with Rob, GMail is a masterpiece. Then again, not all things Google are. *cough* Froogle *cough* Video *cough*
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Some Waldo-centric comments of mine to Savas on the WCF/Atlas thing. Summarizing; the stack makes a sucky abstraction of the network.
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“The URI scheme should answer the question of “what application interface should I expect?”, which is a a lot more than “what protocol should I use?”” Amen.
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Apparently REST won, and Bill Gates says we need microformats.

Wow, when it rains, it pours. Finally, the Web’s getting its due.

Ok, so who wants to break the news to the Grid folk? 8-)

Tags: rest, grid, web.

Feel the love! 8-) As my friends in grade 3 used to say, “Pile on!”
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“I’m a Lo-Restafarian”. So does a Lo-Restafarian believe that all components expose the same interface? And can I be both Lo and Hi? If yes to both, count me in too.
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Human proxies on the Web; interesting. It reminds me of something back from 1999/2000, but I can’t remember the name.
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