All valid points. There must be cooperation between a client and server at some level!
I have two problems with RPC style implementations on the Web: 1) The RPC paradigm hides the advanced properties of the Web and makes them really difficult to leverage 2) The RPC protocol and serialization behavior is totally opaque to any client or server not using a compatible RPC library, of which (as in GWT) there is usually only one, in one language. Jerome's proposed use of the GWT RPC serialization works around both of these objections. Objection #1 goes away because the serialized representations are exposed using Restlet. Objection #2 goes away for two reasons: a) (weak) The GWT RPC serialization is not really very opaque (compared to, say RMI tunnelled over HTTP). It's JSON and, while terse, not beyond comprehension. I have actually written stuff to do GWT RPC server interop with non-GWT clients, and it's possible, if yucky. b) (strong) Restlet makes it trivial to expose alternate variants (e.g. XML, HTML) for other clients, which you just can't do with RPC alone. So I'm signed up for the serialization train. - R On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 5:44 AM, Jerome Louvel <jerome.lou...@noelios.com>wrote: > 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... > ------------------------------------------------------ http://restlet.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=4447&dsMessageId=2375529
