Via Mark Baker I’ve just stumbled across Mark Nottingham’s blog where he has some interesting comments on HTTP Performance. REST is very much at the front of my brain at the moment as I’m designing various REST-ful interfaces for our internal systems at Ingenta.
We’ve already implemented the first of these and found that it was very quick to implement and easy to debug. There were big grins all round when I demonstrated how slapping an XSLT transformation in front of the API gave us a user interface for navigating round the data in the space of about two hours. Would have been a lot more work with a SOAP based interface, IMO.
mnot’s posting on Structured URIs also caught my eye. It would be very nice to be able to describe REST-ful interfaces in this way. Mark’s proposal seems related to Paul Prescod’s WRDL idea. Whereas Mark’s proposal describes the URL structure, parameters and annotates the URL elements with typing data, WRDL describes how one interacts with a REST interface, i.e. what methods and parameters are available, the response types and relationships (links) between resources in the response.
Wonder if the two can be usefully combined?
Structured URIs
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Lost Boy 