Things Caches Do
An illustrated re-introduction to HTTP caching with a focus on gateway caches and their potential benefits within the context of modern, dynamic web applications.
Help! The WS-* vs. REST Debate Has Been Hijacked By People Who Want To Have Logical Discussions About Actual Real World Issues!
A call to arms.
Speaking of, "lying through their teeth..."
Sanjiva Weerawarana is such a tool.
WS-* == Windows Services Dash Star?
It’s that bad.
Digg Scares Me (403 Go Away!)
403 Go Away!
The REST Dialogues
The REST / Web Arch. crowd falls back to its secret weapon in the fight for mankind: The Dialogue.
Such precision
Embracing brokeness.
On HTTP Abuse
And why we need more three-legged stools.
Web Services: what is "success" and how do we get there?
What I think success means with regards to “Web Services”.
What WS-* got wrong
It has nothing to do with the web.
Jonathon Schwartz on WS-Mess
The loyal opposition is growing in weird ways.
WS-Sandwich
Some thoughts on AMQ, the latest solution to all your problems.
Yahoo! Launches REST-based Web Services
Praise for Yahoo! as they launch an initial set of web style APIs.
The Tool Vendor's Dilemma
A theory on why big vendors, big analyst houses, and the tech press want to sell you the worst possible solutions to your problems.
How I Explained REST to My Wife
It’s not a robot thing.
Adam Bosworth, Sloppy KISSes, and WS-Mess
Adam Bosworth joins the Loyal WS-Opposition – minus the loyal part, perhaps.
Mark Nottingham's HTTP Status Report presentation at QCon '08
Protocols are hard. Nobody understands this.
Ryan Tomayko on the Ruby on Rails Podcast
Geoffrey Grosenbach interviewed me yesterday for the Ruby on Rails podcast. We had a nice chat about Python/WSGI, Rack, Sinatra, Rack::Cache, Heroku, and other random stuff.
Resourceful
Interesting looking HTTP client library for Ruby with support for HTTP caching (with pluggable backends), basic and digest auth, intelligent redirect handling. It’s been around for a while and looks like it could eventually become similar in feature set to Python’s httplib2.
CloudKit via cURL
Jon Crosby’s RESTful JSON-based data store with OpenID and OAuth support. It does versioning and produces HTTP cache friendly responses all in a Rack middleware component. Jon’s been working on this for some time and it shows in the code and docs. Awesome.
Concluding Remarks
Jean-Jacques Dubray: “How do the RESTafarians work? They take Roy’s REST, they try to use it for anything in their day to day activities, and then when they stumble upon a problem, they try to find a more or less ‘RESTful’ solution and post it on a blog.”
Precisely!
What I Believe Roy Said
Paul Downey translates Dr. Fielding’s REST APIs Must be Hypertext Driven into lay-hacker speak.
alan.dean's REST Bookmarks on Delicious
Alan Dean has bookmarked over 100 REST related articles in the past two days (and 757 all time). For comparison, I've been bookmarking REST related articles since July 2004 and have a total of 107 bookmarks. It appears that Dean is shooting for a comprehensive list of every resource related to REST ever posted on the web.
REST in the front, RPC in the back
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.”
REST as an engineering discipline
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.”
Don't Fear the URLs
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).
beyond rest
joshua schachter on Rabble/Kellan’s “Beyond REST?” presentation, with an interestingly simple HTTP-based callback system.
Apache 3.0 (a tall tale), Roy Fielding
Nice ApacheCon EU ‘08 presentation (warning: video + slides, no transcript) covering various blue sky stuff on Roy’s brain for Apache and HTTP.
REST: Reducing Effort in Script-based Testing
Boo! Horrible name collision imminent. Is REST really that unknown or do they just not care?
A run-time for “the New Reality”
“… 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.
On software architecture
Roy Fielding on the difference between architecture, architecural styles, patterns, implementations, and applications.
Addressing Doubts about REST
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.
The Technology Rejection Curve
Joe Gregorio: “This is what I call the ‘Scooby-Doo’ phase of the technology rejection curve, where the rubber mask has been ripped off and the crook yells as he’s dragged off by the cops […]”
Hypermedia WTF!
“… there’s a sub-constraint that goes by the unwieldly name of ‘Hypermedia as the engine of application state’, which is arguably the most important constraint of REST in the sense that it alone provides the bulk of the ‘shape’ of RESTful systems …”
Websphere CTO Jerry Cuomo on REST & Project Zero
Whoa. I apparently haven’t spent nearly enough time looking into IBM’s Project Zero. It seems to come down to REST + (Groovy|PHP) and sneaking practical technologies in the front door with a “SOA” label on it. Interesting strategy.
Myth: RESTful Web Services Don't Need an Interface Definition Language
Dare weighs in on the usefulness of description languages in REST-based design and seems to conclude that Uniform Interface != Description Language and that simple discovery ( style) is the appropriate comparison.
Lying Through Their Teeth: Easy vs. Simple
Steve Vinoski compares IDL as used w/ CORBA/DCOM with WSDL as used by WS-*. It’s interesting that IDL served as more than just a description for machines. Humans used IDL as spec text and built services accordingly, just like REST :)
Google Chart API Developer's Guide
I would use this ASAP if not for the privacy requirements around the data I'm charting. There’s really no good general purpose graphing libraries that use nice and simple vector shapes and styles.
WS-* is to REST as Theory is to Practice
Dare talks about his transition from WS-* to REST proponent. This mirrors a lot of people’s experience, including my own.
RESTafarian SOA killers?
“We (the RESTafarians) are not stubborn zealots. We’re just right. Sorry :–)”
Ian Bicking: Prism
“… 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.”
The ESB Question
This is a scary description of a small chunk of my tech career: “In a previous life, I helped develop ESBs. I’ve written about them and I’ve promoted them. But somewhere along the way, I lost the religion.”
Rails 2.0: Preview Release
“… 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.”
The Rest of REST
Slides from the presentation Roy will be giving in about an hour at RailsConf Europe.
A little REST and Relaxation
How long has this been floating around? Roy Fielding on building the web… (via Aristotle Pagaltzis on rest-discuss)
Twitter API Traffic is 10x Twitter’s Site
Do not try to measure APIs vs site traffic… that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth… There is no APIs.
Bill de hÓra: Design for the web
“… 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…”
Udell Interviews Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby on "RESTful Web Services"
Ugghh, this is 7 days old now and I still haven’t had a chance to listen… It’s the best interview ever when I imagine it in my head :)
The future is yesterday [plasmasturm.org]
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…
RESTful Web Services (Paperback) : by Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby [amazon.com]
A site for sore eyes :)
Fielding’s Dissertation [docunext.com]
Section by section interpretation and notes on Fielding’s Disseration on REST.
Koranteng's Toli: Crawl Before You Walk
On JSF: “Waiting 5 years before you adopt the native architecture of the web is almost inexcusable. The web won’t (and didn’t) wait that long.”
ROA Maturity Model
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.
PUT is not UPDATE [cafe.elharo.com]
Hence the multiple disclaimers in the article, such as, “I hesitated to include this table. … What I don’t want to happen is that you start thinking of web resources as SQL tables. Don’t do that.”
Sun proposes to apply Web service standardization principles to REST
Elliotte isn’t pulling any punches :)
HTTP/1.1 (DELETE, GET, HEAD, PUT, POST)
Nice activity diagram describing the resolution of response status codes given various request methods and headers. Full res GIF, JPEG, PNG, and SVG.
Are we gonna bash Restlet next? [brandonwerner.com]
I've been meaning to spend some time in Restlet for some time now. Looks like it’s gaining traction with the EE crowd. Err, well, uhh, some of the EE crowd, anyway.
An OpenID is not an account!
OpenID solves the identity problem, not the trust problem. When a user authenticates with OpenID, what they are doing is stating “I have the ability to prove my ownership of this URL”.
Reinventing the WS Stack
“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
The Role of Resources in REST
“Each resource demarcates a subset of an application’s state, and becomes a handle by which other applications can interact with that state.”
InfoQ: Interview: Pete Lacey Criticizes Web Services
Wow, I'm flattered blush Turns out I do know something about SOA after all. Speaking of “Motherhood and Apple Pie” – I quite liked that essay but it was one of those that never really took off.
Socio-political and Commercial Motivations for WS-*
Nice bit of history showing the chain of events that led to WS-*.
Stefan Tilkov on SOA
Extremely clear and right take on REST, WS, and other techniques for distributing systems.
How We Wish Our SOs Really Talked
“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.”
A Bright, Shiny Service: Sparklines
Joe Gregorio throws together a RESTful web service for generating sparklines.
Lever and fulcrum
“Jim Gray reminded me that TerraServer does offer SOAP interfaces. And yet those interfaces demonstrably have not inspired a flurry of innovation. Why not?”
Integrate This
Looks like an interesting new blog with proper taste for integration technologies. I can’t figure out who it is though…
The wrong end of the telescope?
You’ll have to excuse my ego linking but having Udell point to you is like have Carson ask you onto the Tonight Show.
PEAR 1.4.0, meet REST 1.0
Greg Beaver talks about some of the benefits of REST based design as he’s moving PEAR from XML-RPC to standrad HTTP/URIs/XML.
A REST Intervention
Koranteng ponders how it is possible for REST based systems to kick so much ass.
What Does SOAP/WS Do that A REST System Can't?
I didn’t know SOAP/WS systems were so capable. Astounding!
Radical Simplification
Everything I ever wanted to say about the current state of software development in ~50 slides. Thanks, Sam.
Don't throw out the SOAP with the bathwater
Udell wishes REST and WS-* could get along… The REST people did too – two or three years ago (e.g. Prescod, Baker).
Lesson's learned launching a web service
Google reflects on some of the decisions made for the AdWords API.
Roots of the REST/SOAP Debate
Paul Prescod gives some background and opinion on the REST/SOAP debate.
Show Me the Code
Joe Gregorio’s second installment in his series on building RESTful applications shows us how to build a bookmark service kind of like del.icio.us. He nailed this one really nicely.
SOAP is Comatose But Not Officially Dead!
Carlos Perez with a nice wrap up of recent WS-* vs. REST discussion around the blogosphere.
SOAP is boring, wake up Big Vendors or get niched
More reports of shrinking WS-* mindshare and cries for tools for building REST based architecture.
The sad state of SOAP interoperability
Complexity is kryptonite to interoperability. It’s that simple.
WS-Who's-on-First
Oh, this is brilliant. Look at the bright side, Mark, at least it’s horribly useless in a way that’s interoperable!
REST Intro and Overview
Paul James wrote this nice technical summary on REST and competing technologies back in September 2004 and I missed it somehow.
Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One
Finally hits 1.0. If you read one big nasty spec this year, this should be it. It’s actually full of stories and other weird stuff that make portions kind of fun.
The Restful Web
Joe Gregorio has a new XML.com column called “The RESTful Web” where he just posted his first article. This is great news. No one seems to want to stand up and bring REST to the masses.
httperf - A Tool for Measuring Web Server Performance
I can finally shelve my bash/curl framework :)
Showing Off
:) “… it isn’t about REST or SOAP or WS-* or .NET or Java or whatever, it’s about easy.” — Tim Bray
Ed, settle down. And please don't call it "WS-mess"...
… there has been a recent round of “glowing reviews from analysts”. What could possible go wrong?
Bloglines Web Services API Documentation
A nice, simple HTTP/XML based API for bloglines. I hope this trend continues.
The ‘Web’ in Web Services
Mark Nottingham wondering why WS-Transfer (HTTP wrapped up in SOAP wrapped up in HTTP bwhhahaha) didn’t get more heat from the opposition.
SOAP Problems
A big list of problems with the current WS stack. Contains pointers to mailing-list discussion on various issues.
A complete guide to WS in one, short paragraph
Sean McGrath backing Tim Bray on the Loyal WS-Opposition.
Joe Joins Loyal WS-Opposition
Joe Gregorio on Tim Bray’s “The Loyal WS-Opposition” post. This might end up being a real committee or something.
The Loyal WS-Opposition
Tim Bray on WS-Sanity: “So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to stay out of the way and watch the WS-visionaries and WS-dreamers and WS-evangelists go ahead and WS-build their WS-future.”
Architecture of the World Wide Web, First Edition
A beautiful mish-mash of what works on the web. Hits Last Call WD.