Web Things, by Mark Baker

Compare and contrast;

His taste in design was by and large extraordinary. And yet he did it in a way that you were only barely conscious that he was nudging you toward better design.

(Vint Cerf on Jon Postel)

Dave reminds us that Jon Postel died seven years ago today. Wow, seven. Update; the anniversary of his death was the 16th.

I attended Jon’s last IETF meeting, in Chicago, and I’ll never forget the plenary discussion where the hot topic was Jon’s position as Director of IANA (this was back when it mattered – when it played the role currently played by ICANN) and the importance of that position. During the back-and-forth, somebody pointed out that although everybody trusts Jon, the position itself is arguably too powerful, and would we trust everybody who ever held that position.

The reason I’ll never forget the meeting is because of something eerily prescient Vint Cerf (or at least I think it was him) said; “God forbid something to happen should Jon”. Of course, Vint, as a good friend of Jon, knew that he’d been gravely ill in the past, but still. A few weeks later, whammo.

FWIW, I became a big fan of Postel over the approximately two years prior, as I spent a lot time studying his (IMO) greatest gift to the world, the RFC series. In fact, Rohit penned a wonderful tribute to him grounded in the series, including a “Greatest Hits” list; a must read.

The aforementioned Chui Tey has a weblog. Seems like a bright guy, doing cool stuff. Subscribed!
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Two back-to-back messages received on a popular mailing list;

Hi Everyone, I am new and haven’t done soaps yet. Will be doing first cp this weekend. My question is this can I use those rubbermaid plastic containers they sell everywhere for cp soaps and do I have to line it with something if I do use it? Also I bought some cultured buttermilk blend in the baking section of food store. Can I use this along with or make own recipe. Also getting lard is very hard here in Baltimore as they don’t seem to have it anymore. I don’t want to use talon but would prefer lard. Does anyone know where I could get it without going to a pig farm. thanks, Karen in BMore

Followed three minutes later by this;

Hi, I am sorry that this maybe a group that doesn’t make soaps. If it is I am sorry because my questions were in reference to making soaps. Thanks anyway. Karen in BMore

The mailing list? You guessed it, soapbuilders. 8-)

“emacs is a nice operating system, but it lacks a good text editor.” ROTFL!
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Congrats to Eugene, Rich and crew!!
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A good comment from Chui Tey over in Steve’s comments.

Interfaces defining many kinds of messages imposes unncessary [sic] coupling, when what is required is for documents to be thrown over the other side of the wall, leaving the other party to decide what order to parse and process the document.

So in the spirit of the Zero/One/Infinity rule, what is he saying? Is it a) services should not have interfaces, b) services should share a common interface, or c) services should have whatever interface they want?

“Ah, those were the good old days”. Indeed. 1998 was a very good year. Coincidentally, webbroker was published the week after I attained “Web nirvana”. +1 to both of Mike’s points.
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Dave Orchard posted a pretty well argued treatise on what is, essentially, a defense of the right for Web services to not adopt the stateless interaction and more importantly, the resource identification constraints which are so important to the Web.

As I explained in my response, if Dave was arguing that Joe Architect should have the right to not follow these constraints (which of course, he already does), he’d have my full support, since in the small, that is often necessary.

However, in the large – when taking into account the value of participating in the information space that is the Web, and of leveraging rather than fighting its network effects – I cannot support him in his attempts to standardize known bad practice, even for non-Web systems.

I won’t bore you with yet another drawn-out description of “why”, since I think I’ve made that clear in the past; the Web is what Web services are trying to be, so why fight it?

Dave points to his original piece on XML-RPC back in 1998. Item number 30 includes some, erm, interesting claims;

But RPC is important, no matter what format is used, because it allows choices

In allows choices by rejecting an architectural constraint which has been the foundational constraint of large scale, loosely coupled, distributed systems, since there’s been large scale, loosely coupled, distributed systems … for about 40 years now.

you can replace a component with another one

Ah, substitutability. Note that you can only replace an XML-RPC component with another one that has the same interface, at least if interoperability is important. Compare that to a system where every component has the same interface, where you can submit a document to any component for processing. Now that’s what I call substitutability.