August 28, 2008 at 7:49PM I’m heading to Software Freedom Day 2008
You should head too. There’ll be beer, and Camara is a good cause.
August 20, 2008 at 3:10PM On REST
Tim Bray posted up a good piece called ‘REST Questions’, and one of the commentators asked several questions I felt I should respond to. This was my response with some light editing and additional links:
Mainly because there is still a little confusion on what exactly REST is?
REST is an architectural style. I think the confusion is that people confuse ‘architectural style’ with ‘architecture’ and ‘protocol’, neither of which an architectural style is.
As a technology person, I sure wish REST had some very, very distinct features.
It does, only the thing to remember is that it is neither an architecture nor a protocol, but describes a set of useful and interrelated properties an architecture or protocol fitting it would have as well as the benefits and demerits resulting.
The confusion here is that people are committing a reification fallacy: they’re taking something abstract and treating it as if it’s more concrete than it is.
Even with AJAX...
That’s apples and amoebas. AJAX is quite a concrete thing: making HTTP requests in Javascript within a browser.
Let me ask this question, is there a REST RFC?
No, but there could be, and it’d be informational.
Could one be implemented?
Based on REST, you could ‘implement’ it, after a fashion, by designing a protocol based on REST.
Let me put it this way: a protocol or architecture is a reification or ‘implementation’ of one or many architectural styles. Similarly, an application or system is a reification/implementation of one or more protocols and/or architectures.
What if a server or client library fails to implement the features properly, is it still REST?
Clients and servers don’t implement REST, they implement RESTful protocols. What they’re doing is implementing or using the protocol incorrectly by going against its grain.
Lets say I don’t get HTTP right. I don’t use PUT, I don’t use DELETE. I use a heavy RPC oriented XML messaging format in POST requests. Heavy requests. Am I building a REST application?
PUT and DELETE have nothing to do with REST. You’re confusing REST’s uniform interface constraint with how HTTP implements it. RPC as an architectural style (yep, it is: it’s initial reification from style to protocol was probably RFC1050, though I’m sure something predates that) is diametrically opposed in most regards to REST, so no, it wouldn’t be RESTful. The Flickr API is RPC, plain and simple. The same goes for the ‘RESTful’ Twitter API and the ‘RESTful’ Last.fm API, both of which are RPC and definitely not RESTful.
Can you use custom XML RPC formats with REST?
I’m not quite sure what you mean, but if you mean using XML-RPC as an object serialisation format similar to JSON, sure, but that’s as far as it goes.
If REST is essentially getting HTTP right?
Yes and no. Using HTTP in a RESTful manner is getting HTTP right, but HTTP is not REST, it’s protocol that adheres to the REST architectural style.
August 5, 2008 at 10:21PM Decluttering my feeds
I’ve decided I’m cutting back on the 156 feeds I’m currently subscribed to. While this isn’t quite the heights I was once at, the clutter still feels oppressive. Nothing will escape the wrath of the cull, so I may end up unsubscribing from even friend’s blogs (though I’m considering ways of avoiding that).
The system is this: I’ve consolidated all the feeds into a single Bloglines folder called ‘Clutter’. As feeds are updated in this, they will end up moving into one of three other folders: ‘Daily’ for daily reads, ‘Weekly’ for weekly reads, and ‘Whenever’ for stuff that I’ll read when I’ve a chance, but I’m not too bothered about. This final folder contains the stuff that I’d have little compunction marking all read.
Additionally, there’s a folder called ‘Provisional’. It’s into this folder that anything I subscribe to in the future will go. If there haven’t been any interesting updates within a month of subscription, they’re gone.
This is part of a mission I gave myself today to declutter my life. Next up will be my computer here at work. I’m seriously thinking of killing off Ubuntu and replacing it with something much more minimalist. Ditto for finally reading Getting Things Done and putting it into practice.
So much to do...
July 7, 2008 at 10:06PM Star Little Thing: Lovers Of Life
I could never remember who performs this, so that’s my excuse for posting it up!
July 2, 2008 at 10:42PM It’s too orangey for crows!
Now that makes me nostalgic.
June 26, 2008 at 2:02AM Archive index pages no longer indexed
There! By having my blogging engine include this tiny piece of HTML markup into the head of all the monthly index pages, they should no longer be indexed by search engines, which means having nobody stumbling on them by accident:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"/>
June 25, 2008 at 5:49PM I’ve been sucked into twitter!
I know I’m going to regret this! I’ve resisted it for ages, but I’ve finally given in and created a twitter account because somebody who’s a Blacknight customer was having some problems and I thought I could give a hand.
You can see my stream at http://twitter.com/talideon.
