David Chappell declares the REST vs WS-* war over
To anybody who’s paying attention and who’s not a hopeless partisan,
the war between REST and WS-* is over. The war ended in a truce
rather than crushing victory for one side–it’s Korea, not World War
II. The now-obvious truth is that […]
One of the least well understood core tenets of the REST architectural
style is that “hypermedia is the engine of application state”. Which
basically means that responses from the server will be documents that
include URIs to everything you can do next. For example, if GET a
blog post the response document will have URIs embedded in […]
I recently setup an automated backup system for my (and my
wife’s) blog.1 Based on the
recommendation of Mr O’Grady (and my belief that
RESTful architectures are a good way to solve most problems) I decided
to use Amazon’s S3 as the off site storage. I did not to
take the same approach as RedMonk, however, because I wanted […]
Benjamin Carlyle has posted a followup about
using PUT to create new resources
in which he brings up some interesting issues.
First, it seems I miss understood his original idea slightly. My
misunderstanding does not affect how I feel about his approach much.
I don’t like the idea of PUT-ting to a “factory” resource with a GUID
in […]
It seems that I was a little unclear in
my post about using the HTTP PUT method for resource
creation, so let me try again.
In this post Benjamin Carlyle points out that
using POST for resource creation has some serious flaws. To see the
main problem with using POST for resource creation consider the
following scenario.
You make a POST […]
Benjamin Carlyle has an interesting bit about the possibility of
deprecating the HTTP POST method. I think most people who have
thought deeply about RESTful architectures have had similar thoughts.
GET, PUT and DELETE are all nicely idempotent, but POST is not.
GET, PUT, and DELETE have clean, well defined semantics, but POST does
not. POST generally seems […]
Never provide representations of static resources by dynamic means.
Or, serve anything you possibly can directly from a file on a local
file system.
There are several reasons for avoiding dynamic mechanisms whenever
possible. The most obvious reason is that it is wasteful to generate
the identical content repeatedly. If the resource never, or very rarely, changes you […]
I am in the process of redesigning my blog. The default Wordpress
theme is nice and all but Charlie and
Catherine have shamed me into
doing something less mundane.
One of the things that had bothered me was my blog roll. It was
out-of-date because Wordpress’s default way of handling links make it
pretty painful to import a list […]
Johannes Ernst posted an interesting comparison of REST vs SOAP (via: James Governor). He makes an excellent point that SOAP URIs point at the type, rather than an instance, of a service. I do not think that the fact that there will be more REST URIs means that this space is more innovative. […]
