{"id":305,"date":"2004-03-12T00:02:00","date_gmt":"2004-03-12T04:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/wp\/?p=301"},"modified":"2004-03-12T00:02:00","modified_gmt":"2004-03-12T04:02:00","slug":"an-historic-look-at-specific-vs-generic-interfaces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/2004\/03\/an-historic-look-at-specific-vs-generic-interfaces\/","title":{"rendered":"An "historic" look at specific vs. generic interfaces"},"content":{"rendered":"

I stumbled upon an “old”\npaper<\/a> by\nDan Larner<\/a>\nyesterday that I first read\nwhen it was published back in ’98, but had forgotten all about. I find it\npoignant today not because I agree with its conclusions (I don’t), but because\nit so well describes the tension between specific and generic interfaces,\nalbeit without actually acknowledging the tension 8-O<\/p>\n\n

I liked this image in particular;<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the top you see the generic objects\/interfaces, while at the bottom are\nthe specific interfaces; Printer, Scanner, Copier (this is Xerox, after all).\nBut why do those services require specific interfaces? Check out the methods\non Printer; Print, CancelJob, Status. Why is that needed? Why can you just\nnot call GET on the printer to retrieve it’s status, POST to the printer to\nprint a document, and DELETE on a job resource (which is subordinate to the\nprinter) to cancel a job? Simple.<\/p>\n\n

Many of the folks behind HTTP-NG were\nfrom PARC<\/a> where\nILU<\/a>, a CORBA ORB with\nsome funky extensions, provided the impetus for their W3C contributions.\nLike Web services proponents, their backgrounds were with systems which\ndidn’t constrain interfaces, and so it was pretty much an implicit\nrequirement that HTTP-NG would need to support specific interfaces by\nbasically being a messaging layer ala SOAP. It’s too bad they didn’t take\nthe time to study what was capable with the HTTP interface specifically, or\neven constrained interfaces in general. I think that’s a big part of the\nreason why HTTP-NG flopped.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I stumbled upon an “old” paper by Dan Larner yesterday that I first read when it was published back in ’98, but had forgotten all about. I find it poignant today not because I agree with its conclusions (I don’t), but because it so well describes the tension between specific and generic interfaces, albeit without […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26,34],"class_list":["post-305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-soap","tag-w3c"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}