From Roy Fielding's thesis...
"REST is defined by four interface constraints: identification of resources; manipulation of resources through representations; self-descriptive messages; and, hypermedia as the engine of application state."(via the REST Yahoo group)
That last one has my attention.
Scott Hanselman writes (via Sam Gentile)...
The Size of the Framework - Sure, it's big. So was Win32, and so is sun.java.*. Programming isn't all Ruby on Rails, you know. :) The redist is 25 Meg? For what you get that's pretty cheap. That'll fit on any pen-drive and can be downloaded in a few minutes via broadband.I was giving a tour of Squeak Smalltalk to a friend who'd never seen Smalltalk before. I did not have to explain much, just play with some objects, play with Seaside, show some browsers, a workspace, a debugger, look at some code. He got it, in bits and pieces. After a couple hours he was amazed.
He saw that the 3.7 image out of the box is about 15mb. The image I was using was about 22mb. The concept of an image, consisting of "live objects", being persistent, caught on and his eyes lit up. That 22mb contained the persistent objects that we were playing with: Powerpoint-like presentation objects, a 3D scriptable wonderland, rich text being flowed in real-time through multiple arbitrary shapes as I reshaped them. An internet browser, email, etc. A little car and steering wheel that really drives it around. A piano keyboard, and more elaborate instrumentation. All objects in the system, all the code available, all the time, multiple platforms identical, all in less than two dozen megabytes.
Live objects. *That* is amazing and he was amazed.
Philip Greenspun on programming languages...
SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.There are some others to add to the list: Smalltalk, Python, Ruby, SML, etc. But the point is taken.
Sean Mcgrath writes...
Here is the great irony of the Web. It was vastly easier to create a CRUD application (...Create, Report, Update and Delete...) in the days of Dbase II than it is today.Sometime, somehow, we have to get that functionality back.
Radovan Janacek projects the downfall of JSR-xxx before WS-xxx.
But perhaps the decline of Java and C# will *coincide* with that of WS-Complexity. More agile approaches are gaining mindshare both for programming in the small as well as programming distributed systems.
Drawing lines in the sand. Chris Ferris is going for a forest vs. trees argument. Carlos responds to Chris...
If this is the new definition, then I would like to hear a simple explanation on how all this baggage helps improve interoperability. Now if SOAP doesn't say anything about interoperability (i.e. it is orthogonal to REST) then a clear consistent and coherent explanation of WS-* would help.The software worlds own version of March Madness. Now I'm drawing on too many metaphors.
