Hi Jerome,
>
> > So you're forcing one resource to be aware of other resources
> > just because of
> > the way your user interface in designed. If you switch to
> > HTML frames, you no
> > longer need these dependencies because each frame displays
> > only one resource
> > (the content frame, the profile frame, the navigation frame, etc.).
>
> Yes, in this case the resource is a "view resource". The addition of frames
> wouldn't break the design, the Web representation would just remove the
> contextual information (sidebar, etc.) and we would add new dedicated
> resources for the other frames.
>
> > And what about cross references? If you click on a post in
> > one of the thread,
> > the 'post' resource must know about the 'profile' resource
> > because it's
> > part of its 'contextual information'. Now let's say you have
> > a 'More' link in
> > the profile section to display more of your profile info. In
> > order to redisplay
> > the page, the 'profile' resource will have to know about the
> > 'post' resource
> > too (because when you GET /profile/123;details, you need to
> > include the
> > current post). Imagine the graph (and the resulting
> > maintenance nightmare) if
> > you have 5 resources displayed on one page.
>
> I'm not sure to follow you precisely, but for sure a Web page is a
> representation of a single target resource. It doesn't matter how many
> sub-resources or domain objects were used to build this representation.
>
Sorry if I wasn't clear. Let me try again.
You display 2 resources on one page:
1) your profile. By default, the Profile section display your name, but
it include a More link that let's you display your name, your email,
the number of posts you've made, etc.
2) the forum
When you click on a forum thread, the Forum resource must pull the
Profile resource out of the DB in order to redisplay the page.
When you click on the More link (in the Profile section), the
Profile resource must pull out the Forum info out of the DB to
be able to retrieve the page.
So, you're introducing a dependency between these two resources.
If you later decide to display the weather report on that page, both the
Profile and Forum resources will have to be made aware of the WeatherReport
resource in order to display the page. And so on.
If you say that the Profile and WeatherReport resources are part of the
representation of the Forum resource, you must also admit that the
Forum is part of the Profile's (or WeatherReport's) representation.
I think this creates an unmanageable graph.
-vincent.
