Mest

Erik Johnson (via Stefan Tilkov) wonders what's so bad about the "process this" notion. Jim Webber, a coiner of Mest, spent time in his recent QCon talk on this idea before moving on to a nice exposition of HTTP hyperstuff.

I think I have a reasonable handle on what the HTTP methods generally mean. I've not applied them to a wide variety of situations, and I wonder sometimes where that line and whether some specific use is crossing it too far.

More than that though is I've been playing with XMPP a bit again. Where is that line between pushing HTTP too far and jumping over that line into XMPP for "Mest", ad hoc, "process this", I'm not counting on any of the benefits of HTTPness?

These lines are probably fairly blurry on close inspection, when the programmer does not have a clear set of constraints leaning one way (e.g. GET's benefits) or the other (e.g. presence/status). but I've certainly found running an XMPP server and connecting from various systems at least as easy as doing the same with an HTTP server. And XMPP (over HTTP) runs through firewalls, for better or worse.

Anyway... if you are interested in that "one method to process them all" then why not use XMPP for that, and leave HTTP for more specific duties? Or not. If you are in a Mest then are you saying you have no clear understanding of your resources and constraints and so HTTP POST *is* as good as anything?

Just noodling...