Web Things, by Mark Baker

• The Daily WTF – If at first you don’t succeed…
  Idempotence as a weapon. Ouch.
  (tags: idempotence wtf)

• Let the loose coupling take place in the cloud
  “Globally distributed SOA seems to be looming out of the mist, and it is a different shape to what was envisioned a few years back.” Envisioned by some perhaps 8-)
  (tags: rest soa)

• Steve: Developing on the Edge – No, blame whoever uses WSDL
  “Me, I blame WSDL and XSD”. Amen. Both of those encourage practices which are actively harmful to integration; WSDL encourages services to have different interfaces, and XSD limits extensibility (unless you really know what you’re doing).
  (tags: rest webservices soa wsdl xmlschema xsd extensibility)
• Beyond Blogging (application/pdf Object)
  “You can do a lot with collections + CRUD” 8-)
  (tags: atom rest rss)

• Tantek Çelik and Rohit Khare: The Progress and the Promise of Microformats – Knowledge@Wharton
  “We will have succeeded when no one cares”
  (tags: microformats)

• AJAX Bringing Web 2.0 To Web Services According to Evans Data @ AJAXWORLD MAGAZINE
  “The Evans Data survey found a 37% increase in respondents implementing or considering REST, with one out of four surveyed saying that they are considering REST-Based Web Services as a simpler alternative to SOAP-based services.”
  (tags: rest soap soa webservices restvsoa restvsoap)

• Names and addresses
  Norm finally picks a side… the right one, as it turns out 8-)
  (tags: uri url naming webarchitecture)

• WSO2 releases AJAX browser extension
  SOAPHttpRequest?! *groan*
  (tags: soap webservices ajax xmlhttprequest web rest)
• Sun’s Brewin toasts Java
  … and shows a lack of understanding of REST and Web style services. Sounds like they could do with another co-CTO (Tim?) 8-)
  (tags: rest sunw webservices)
• Instant Messaging and Trashing Google
  “I suggest they roll some heads and figure out a real product strategy” Heh. Who couldn’t see that one coming? If I were them, I’d be be giving AOL a call.
  (tags: google gtalk aol im)

• Re: No new mime types
  “RDF categorically *does not solve* this problem. It *mitigates* it, on the belief that we will tend to see less model theories than formats flying around.”. Heh, +1. Of course, I think we will see less model theories.
  (tags: rdf mediatypes iana xml)

I was looking through the scriptaculous drag-and-drop pages tonight, and stumbled upon this markup/script snippet;

<div id="photo1"> <img ... /> </div>
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
 new Draggable('photo1',{revert:true});
</script>

Isn’t that just screaming out for declarative Javascript?

So I quickly hacked together a teeny tiny script to present the Javascript API via a declarative interface. See it in action for yourself (Firefox only). The markup for that script above would be, simply;

<draggable id="photo1" revert="true">
<img src="..." />
</draggable>

I’ve just got drag working right now. Drop will be a little trickier, because I’ve got to decide whether I want to setup something like an “onDrop” handler (pro: powerful, con: powerful), or whether I can define some canned droppable types, like a shopping cart, or a file uploader, etc.. Perhaps both?

An important, nay, foundational part of my mental model for how Internet scale systems work (and many other things, in fact), is that I view standards as axioms.

In linear algebra, there’s the concept of span, which is, effectively, a function that takes a set of vectors as input, and yields the vector space spanned by those vectors; the set of all reachable points. Also, for any given vector space you can find a set of axioms – a minimal set of vectors which are linearly independent of each other (orthogonal), but still span the space (note; I use “axioms” here to refer to a normalized set of basis vectors).

So given, say, HTTP and URIs as axioms (because they’re independent), I can picture the space reachable using those axioms, which is the set of all tasks that can be coordinated without any additional (beyond the axioms) a priori agreement; in this case, the ability to exchange data between untrusted parties over the Internet. I can also easily add other axioms to the fold and envision how the space expands, so I can understand what adding the new axiom buys me. For example, I can understand what adding RDF to the Web gives me.

More interestingly (though far more difficult – entropy sucks), I can work backwards by imagining how I want the space to look, then figure out what axiom – what new pervasively deployed standard – would give me the desired result.

As mentioned, I try to evaluate many things this way, and at least where I know enough to be able to (even roughly) identify the axioms. It’s why Web services first set off my bunk-o-meter, because treating HTTP as a transport protocol is akin to replacing my HTTP axiom with a TCP axiom, which severely shrinks the set of possible things that can be coordinated … to the empty set, in fact. Oops!

See also; mu, the Stack, Alexander, software architecture.