Today it occurred to me that, after a little over ten years of basic fluency in HTML, I have absolutely no idea why the href attribute is named "href". Why not "url", "link", or even just "ref"?
And why we need more three-legged stools.
It's not a robot thing.
Dare Obasanjo is a machine.
Assaf Arkin: "There’s also some back-end processing going on, and I think that part is using DRb for now. But maybe the next update it will switch over to RMI or UNIX pipes or whatever. I don’t much care because the library does the talking, and besides, it’s only distributed in the sense that we have two pieces of code running with different PIDs. Not particularly important what’s happening on the wire, as long as it’s fast."
Bill de hÓra knocks one out of the park: "I think sometimes that the problem people have with REST is that it's so well-defined; it's not witchcraft, it's not a cargo cult. You can't argue with it on a relativistic basis or apply clever rhetoric or continuously redefine what it means. An architectural style isn't 'good' or 'bad' - you have to decide if it's the right fit for your problem space and if not, you have to come up with a more appropriate one."
Adam Wiggins on Sinatra's blasphemous approach to controllers and routing. AKA: the thing that makes Sinatra my web layer of choice (well, that and throw :halt).
Still too much work but it's nice to see some support for conditional GET making its way into the framework.
joshua schachter on Rabble/Kellan's "Beyond REST?" presentation, with an interestingly simple HTTP-based callback system.
Great look at varnish and concerns around putting a front-end reverse proxy cache in place.
Nice ApacheCon EU '08 presentation (warning: video + slides, no transcript) covering various blue sky stuff on Roy's brain for Apache and HTTP.
"... the 'new reality' is the realization that Dynamic Scripting Languages are ready for prime-time and that REST is a simple, yet scalable architecture to build a servers on." - I'd say that's definitely a new reality for the enterprise, Bill.
Brad Neuberg (Google Gears): "Our historical closeness to the web creates a kind of myopia, where we can't see how amazing it is. It's a billion Library of Alexandria's dropped into our laps."
Roy Fielding on the difference between architecture, architecural styles, patterns, implementations, and applications.
Stefan Tilkov addresses some of the most common doubts people have when first deprogram and come up to speed on REST. Short and well done, IMO. I think I'll be handing this out quite a bit in the future.
I need to give jQuery a serious look. Prototype's Ajax.Request stuff is crippled (no PUT or DELETE) to the point of being worthless; the jQuery selector magic looks a lot more intriguing than what you get with Prototype, too.
"The ngxhttpemptygifmodule keeps a 1x1 transparent GIF in memory that can be served very quickly." -- That's so amazingly awesome; spacer.gif for life.
I repackaged mongrel_proctitle as a GemPlugin so that all mongrels on use it automatically. This is the first chance I've had to play with GitHub, too. Lovin' it.
Constantly updates the the process title ($0) with something like: "mongrel_rails [10010/2/358]: handling 127.0.0.1: HEAD /feed/calendar/global/91/6de4". Let's you monitor backends with ps and top.
An epiphany everyone needs to experience.
Peter Cooper scratches the deployment problem itch.
"... even if you have a single server, a proxy in front can help performance significantly. Through the simple expedient of buffering, your heavyweight processes don't waste time serving every request for the entire length of time the client is connected"
"I have spent many years working on the FreeBSD kernel, and only rarely did I venture into userland programming, but when I had occation to do so, I invariably found that people programmed like it was still 1975."
Bob Ippolito wrote up some pros and cons to reverse proxy implementations in different servers a few months back. I don't think much of it is out of date at this point but nginx isn't represented.
That's much nicer. Amazon should adopt it immediately.
"... if all you can think of is reasons why the web is stupid and awkward, and you think it’s some giant step backward (from what?), then you haven’t thought very deeply about what’s happened in the world of technology and why."
"... Rails has picked a side in the SOAP vs REST debate. Unless you absolutely have to use SOAP for integration purposes, we strongly discourage you from doing so. As a naturally extension of that, we’ve pulled ActionWebService from the default bundle."
Stefan Tilkov with a poster-size illustration of HTTP client errors (4xx series only).
How long has this been floating around? Roy Fielding on building the web... (via Aristotle Pagaltzis on rest-discuss)
RESOLVED FIXED
"... on Java, too many web frameworks - think JSF, or Struts 1.x - consider the Web something you work around using software patterns. The goal is get off the web, and back into middleware..."
"413 Requested Entity Too Large"
I saw this same note on rest-discuss the other day and thought it struck a chord. :) Jon Hanna on SOAP, Web 2.0, other stuff...
A site for sore eyes :)
"How I explained REST to my wife" in French!
How did we ever get anything done without superfluous quadrants and models. Bring 'em on. The trick is making something every developer would know is a joke but that could make it past a manager or architect.
exec 3<> /dev/tcp/$HOST/80 What?! How cool is that.
Nice activity diagram describing the resolution of response status codes given various request methods and headers. Full res GIF, JPEG, PNG, and SVG.
Wow. Much worse than I thought.
"All you have to do is change the internal processing, add 200 more methods to the HTTP parser, serve Bittorrent over Ethernet, and have it save Korean orphans while eating a Mango in the back seat of an El Camino driven by twenty midget clowns."
Sam with a very simple, step by step tutorial on using your site as an OpenID identity provider.
"Should machine-to-machine, multi-hop, RESTful communications expose a need for additional functionality, then, and only then, will the need be addressed. This is opposed to the WS style of standards creation where solutions are created that go in search
"Each resource demarcates a subset of an application's state, and becomes a handle by which other applications can interact with that state."
Aristotle just destroys that recent reg article that suggests we need to shit-can 20 years of engineering masterpiece for distributed objects. Nice piece!
"Why would my sister want to borrow someone else's broom, you sexist ass? My sister is a lawyer for the friggin' ACLU! before tossing her Napa Valley cab in the poor guy's face."
Great read...
Tim Berners-Lee's blog. Finally!
Yep :)
You'll have to excuse my ego linking but having Udell point to you is like have Carson ask you onto the Tonight Show.