Web Things, by Mark Baker

Via Stefan, a proposal from the WSO2 gang for an approach to decentralizing media types and removing the requirement for the registration process.

Been there, tried that. I used to think that was a good idea, but no longer do.

Problem one: an abundance of media types is a bad thing for pretty much the same reasons that an abundance of application interfaces is a bad thing; the more that is different, the more difficult interoperability becomes. We need less, more general media types, not more specific ones.

Problem two, specific to their solution for this “problem” (which is “application/data-format;uri=http://mediatypes.example.com/foo/bar”): media type parameters don’t affect the semantics of the payload. This solution requires changing the Web to incorporate parameters in this way. Consider, if an existing firewall was configured to block, for example, image/svg+xml content. If SVG were also assigned its own “media type URI” and delivered using application/data-format, that firewall wouldn’t be able to block it. Oops.

Problem three (which mnot convinced me of): having your media type reviewed by the capable volunteers on ietf-types, is a good thing. Sure, you could still do that while using a decentralized token/process, but I consider having motivation for review built-in to the mechanism a feature, not a bug, especially given problem one above.

Update; here’s an older position of mine.

If you’re a Firefox user (or any browser user for that matter), run, don’t walk, to download the latest Firefox 3 Beta. Damn, this thing is lean and mean. I’ve got my usual 40-50 tabs open right now and it’s consuming about one third to one quarter of the memory FF2 did on WinXP. Plus tab and new window creation is instantaneous, even after many hours of use. There’s some subtle chrome improvements too, including little things like smooth-scrolling tabs that prevent me from getting lost when I’ve got more than about 10 tabs per window; very useful for Wiki-despamming or reading developer documentation.

Go!

My latest article is up on InfoQ. I hope it help demystifies the “Hypermedia as the engine of application state” constraint just a little bit.

I remember being a bit of a smart-ass nerd in high school, and taking pleasure in deriving novel insults my friends and I could deliver at the stoner-types, or anybody who else who crossed paths with us. The more difficult it was for them to understand why it was an insult, the better. So when I came up with “Your family tree has cycles”, I was one happy geek.

Little did I know at the time though, that my own family tree had a cycle. It turns out that my paternal Grandfather’s paternal great-Aunt, was my paternal Grandmother’s sister’s-in-law’s great Grandmother. My Dad’s cousin, who discovered the cycle this past weekend, doesn’t think the family knew about it. I believe the circumference of that cycle is seven.

Anybody else got any cycles they’d like to share? Note; if the circumference of your cycles are less than five, you might want to keep those to yourself 8-)

I’ve been thinking about writing this for some time now. In fact, it’s probably way overdue. But there’s no better time than the present, as they say.

I’ve had enough. I’m not participating in any more “REST vs. SOAP” discussions. When I started on this mission to educate those who didn’t understand how the Web could help them, I figured it would be pretty straightforward; I’d explain it, they’d understand, and then we’d all skip away hand-in-hand whistling show tunes. Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way. Instead, I ended up spending on the order of $100K of my own money on travel, as well as the opportunity cost of many hundreds of otherwise billable hours, for what is working out to be essentially nothing in return. If that weren’t enough, my health has suffered the past year or so, in ways I won’t get into here, but that I’m confident are in part attributable to the despair I’ve felt over this extended period of frustration.

The war really has been won, I realize that now. And I’m happy to pat myself on my back for a job well done, despite what it’s cost me. Would I do it over again? No bloody way. I should have just “pulled a Roy” and continued to work with and improve the Web, but restrict my Web services standards work to trying to minimize the harm Web services were doing to the Web (which I was doing, but I went way beyond that). I think Max Planck got it right when he said;

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Oh, and one last thing. I told you so. There, that felt good.

Tim recalls;

I remember the days when it was basically just Mark Baker and me shouting “The WS-King has no WS-clothes and there are WS-bleeding-sores on his WS-butt!”

One of these days, I should put together a little retrospective on the past 7-8 years: the players, the converts, the milestone moments, etc… Stay tuned.

Well, that was frustrating.

(Very) Long story short, motherboard & hard drive running this weblog are simultaneously fried a few weeks ago. I then discover my weblog backup system stopped working earlier this year (you may have noticed the most “recent” post from April). Luckily though, I’m able to scrape off enough of the WordPress mysql database from the fried disk (thanks R-Linux!) to be able to graft it onto an existing database, permitting me to dump a snapshot and recover it completely (knock on wood).

Please let me know if you encounter any problems.

I’ve had a couple of conversations recently – one online and one off – that both centered around an important aspect of distributed computing that is often overlooked: the role of users in determining message semantics. When we write and deploy software, either client or server, it is easily forgotten that this software has been deployed on behalf of some user, either us, our employer, a customer, etc.. For example, Web browsers act on behalf of the users sitting right in front of them, while Web servers act on behalf of the publishers. We even have a special name for this software – though only typically used to refer to clients – user agents. The name drives home the point that they do our bidding alone. When a user initiates an action which requires messages to be sent, then the message needs to reflect the intent of the user. For example (the subject of the aforementioned online discussion) when a user clicks a link in a browser it is with the intent of dereferencing that link, an action which is by definition safe. Therefore, any message sent as a result of a clicked link must be a safe message, otherwise it would be misrepresenting the user. Another scenario where this issue pops up is in the context of application/session state. My friend Bob Haugen and I recently discussed whether the canonical Web shopping cart was stateful or stateless. After a few back-and-forths, we had boiled down the discussion – I thought it was stateful, Bob wasn’t sure – to this same issue. Bob thought that the POST message that gets sent in response to a “purchase” action by the user had the meaning “Purchase what’s in that shopping cart”. And if that was the case, he’d be right, it would be stateless. But my point was that the message can’t mean that because pretty much every user wants to be explicit about what they’re purchasing, and so include the details about the purchase – items, quantity, price, shipping terms, etc.. – in the message sent to the server. In explaining my position, I pointed out that pretty much every shopping cart service I’ve ever used notifies users if prices changes between the time the item was added to the shopping cart, and when the purchase is initiated. This is done because the service understands that it is the user’s intent to be specific about what they’re buying, it’s just that the technology in use – a Web browser – doesn’t easily permit that kind of information to be maintained on the client so that it can be sent over in the POST message. Food for thought, I hope.

While reading the comments in Steve’s initial ESB post, I spotted a paragraph that nailed the elephant-in-the-room meta issue on the head;

Its funny but so few people who also use ESB and WS-* style protocols and tools frequently operate with such disdain for other ways of doing things.

There are, of course, a very large number of automated solutions to a particular problem. But of all of them, only a few will exhibit the desired properties, to the proper degree, that you require for the environment in which it is to be deployed. The more you require, the fewer the number of suitable solutions.

IMO, if you don’t feel disdain towards a lot (97%?) of these solutions, then you simply don’t understand what it means to be a software architect.

I’m with Stefan. Steve Vinoski’s always been somebody you want to listen very carefully to regarding distributed computing and enterprise integration, but even more so now that he’s left the employ of a company with skin in that game. That message isn’t entirely new, it’s just more obviously the message 8-)