Re: [xml-dev] Transformative Programming: Flow-based, functional, and more
Uche,
I think we've got a little mixture of concerns going on here. I'd expect one can describe some form of (2D or more?) continuum from tuples to DCS/COBRA and if you did so, REST would be sitting far closer to the simple tuple origin than the other. However, REST is an architecture for data exchange/manipulation, tuples are a formal mathematical model. Even at the REST resource level I'd be hard pressed to apply the tuple description to the resources unless you want to regard them as purely opaque blobs? I actually like that view of the REST resources (since, as you point out it allows for loose coupling), but it denies the reality that the utility of REST comes from the fact that the parties do in fact have expectations as to the contents of the resources and the HTTP headers and MIME types shape those expectations. If I claim to be delivering you XML and you actually get JSON the loose coupling is now a bug, not a feature. (Though SImon seems to imply I should just go ahead and figure out what parser to use and cope with it anyway... ;-)
Peter Hunsberger
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 12:35 PM, Uche Ogbuji <[email protected]> wrote:
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 8:01 AM, Peter Hunsberger <[email protected]> wrote:The Verb/Resource model of REST is not a simple tuple pair, unless you referring to PUT / GET parameterization which is probably a perfect example of why such interfaces are so error prone. The rest (um, no pun intended) of HTTP carries with it headers and Mime types pointing to varying levels of formal specification as to the resource contents with varying success.I don't understand why you think that the fact that e.g. HTTP has headers or uses a controlled vocabulary in the form of MIME prevents it from being a simple tuple-space-style architecture. Having worked with tuple-space-style architectures before the Web (e.g. Linda derivatives) I don't see much great distinction. I *do* see a huge distinction, on the other hand from DCE/CORBA-style tightly-bound cross-application architectures, again having done a lot of work on those as well.I believe that REST is precisely in line with the idea of loose coupling between apps. However, as has been pointed out, scalability becomes the tricky problem even when you've architected things the right way.--Uche Ogbuji http://uche.ogbuji.net
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