Re: how does one talk to a web service? What makes something a web service?
On 2009-06-28 19:23:10 -0400, Tom Anderson <twic@urchin.earth.li> said:
- REST has nothing to do with virtual file systems. You're confusing
meaningful URLs with REST - they're actually *completely* unrelated. A
lot of people thing REST means urls.th.at/look/like/this, but that's
mistaken.
(snip)
In Fielding-approved REST, you never construct URLs, you always obtain
them from some resource you've been served (i think the idea is called
'hyperlinks', you may have heard of it), so their structure is never
relevant.
I've cut the rest because I want to talk about this theme briefly.
Tom's right; in a hyperlink-oriented structure, you navigate from some
set of root links to the data you want, rather than constructing URLs.
However, constructible, cleanly-structured URLs are an important human
factors element. Human-readable and -constructable URLs allow long-time
users of an application to skip straight to portions of a service that
they want to use, and they can be used to cut corners when it's useful
to do so in client applications and mashups.
This is something the W3C guys have been banging on about, somewhat
futilely, for years (http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI explains part
of their rationale, and goes further to cover other good ideas, like
removing file extensions and other implementation details from the URI
namespace), so it's gratifying that people are starting to figure it
out on their own.
-o