In Jon Udell's End HTTP Abuse piece he observes, as have many recently, that many of the popular web services don't do the right thing with GET and POST. In my paper for XTech this was one of the criteria I used to compare a number of different web services. The complete list of reviewed … Continue reading Ending HTTP Abuse →

Prompted by some contributions from Mark Pilgrim, I've just made another quick update to the intermediary patterns. This expands on the number of Data patterns to include Page Context Reader and External Context Reader and the Action patterns to include Restyler, Blocker, and Rearranger. Ryan Shaw is also looking at documenting his Greasemonkey script amazon2melvyl … Continue reading More Intermediary Patterns →

Continuing yesterdays theme and after a quick bout of structured procrastination, I give you a first working draft: Patterns of Intermediation. Little more than a shell-document, but I've included some named patterns to get the ball rolling. I'm intending to evolve the descriptions, provide examples, etc so that the patterns conform basically to the Portland … Continue reading Patterns of Intermediation Continued →

Jon Udell has suggested that what we need is an architecture of intermediation. In that piece he's seems to be mostly talking about the need for toolkits that make it easy to build this kind of intermediary. I agree with Simon Willison that Greasemonkey is a pretty powerful way of doing this, especially after looking … Continue reading Patterns of Intermediation →

Continuing his web services experiments, Norm Walsh has apparently been defeated by the complexity of WSDL. Can't say that I blame him not giving up; the fewer moving parts is one of the reasons I like REST so much, there's less chance for APIs to get in the way. I agree with Norm that some … Continue reading RESTful Service Descriptions →

Starting here Norm Walsh is blogging the development of his "Where in the World?" (WITW) web service. The laudable goal being to explore web services architecture and design issues by actually building something, and seeking feedback along the way. Excellent stuff! Elsewhere David Megginson is prompting similar discussion by posing a number of REST design … Continue reading WITW Feedback →

I've been doing some playing with a neat tool called URLinfo. It's a simple form and customizable bookmarklet that allows you to reflect on a given URL to discover all sorts of interesting information, which ranges from related links, validators, del.icio.us bookmarks, and blog backlinks. You can even carry out some basic textual analysis on … Continue reading URLinfo →

The AudioScrobbler folk are thinking very hard about scalability. Having recently switched to a new database server they're now pondering what other changes they may need to make to ensure that the service scales as smoothly as possible. In this posting to the audioscrobbler-development list Richard Jones outlines some proposed options. It seems that they've … Continue reading AudioScrobbler Scalability →