Hi Tim,
Using an object serialization representation does reintroduce strong coupling between a REST client and server. It should only be done for optimization purpose, as an alternative to more reusable and interoperable JSON / XML representations. But wait! XML and JSON do introduce coupling as you need to know their structure in advance most of the time! If you want an even less coupling, then looking towards RDF is a good idea but still you will need to understand some ontologies... With REST/HTTP you can deal with this issue in two ways: - standard representation formats such as HTML, Atom (to a certain extent), PNG, etc. - content negotiation Best regards, Jerome Louvel -- Restlet ~ Founder and Lead developer ~ <http://www.restlet.org/> http://www.restlet.org Noelios Technologies ~ Co-founder ~ <http://www.noelios.com/> http://www.noelios.com De : tpeie...@gmail.com [mailto:tpeie...@gmail.com] De la part de Tim Peierls Envoyé : mardi 21 juillet 2009 15:08 À : discuss@restlet.tigris.org Objet : Re: Guidance on Atom/APP in Restlet On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 4:39 AM, Jerome Louvel <jerome.lou...@noelios.com> wrote: However, for communication with GWT, it is indeed a better idea to rely on JSON. I have also been working on reusing the 'transparent' serialization of beans between Restlet/Server and Restlet/GWT. This serialization is used in GWT-RPC but can be reused in a RESTful way. This isn't quite ready yet, but hopefully for Restlet 2.0 M4, I'll have something more stable. I've already said that this is very cool, but it does make we wonder ... Isn't this sort of, um, cheating? A representation that is coupled to a particular client/service pair? Another few steps over the edge and we're back to RPC-style services. I guess the saving grace is that Restlet makes it easy, or even trivial, to provide other representations in addition to the one that's optimized for common use, and RPC-style frameworks can't offer that at all. As David mentioned, this could be complementary to exposing Atom representations of your resources. Finally, I'm not sure if you need to support the full AtomPub standard or just the Atom XML one. Hmm, the wind is going out of my sails. I started by recognizing that AtomPub seemed to be a natural fit for my domain, and now I'm looking at JSON/serialized beans and "optional" plain Atom feeds. (Optional in the sense that my main applications wouldn't need them, because they'd be happily talking JSON.) Anybody have anything encouraging to say about why I shouldn't just stick with my existing DWR application? (www.directwebremoting.org) --tim ------------------------------------------------------ http://restlet.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=4447&dsMessageId=2375490
