On Sat, 2007-03-17 at 18:05 +0000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Malcolm,
> 
> Thank you for your thoughtful reply, although I think its going to
> take me several re-readings to get a handle on it all. If I have the
> gist of it, it sounds like you're saying that a good design based on a
> thorough understanding of REST and a few conventions or best practices
> using the capabilities that Django already provides may be a simpler
> way to achieve the same goal? I have to admit that throughout working
> on this, I have wondered, and still wonder, if that isn't the better
> approach.

I'm not really trying say to that. Rather, don't try to compartmentalise
things too much. Phrases like "good design" and "more easily" don't make
sense absent a context of *what* you are trying to design. I was trying
to raise a caution that in your enthusiasm you hadn't carefully defined
the particular problem space that you were addressing. It's smaller than
"all web applications with REST access patterns", which was the
impression I got from initially reading your email.

That's all. I realise I spent a lot of time making that point, but I
wanted to throw in some examples that illustrated the logic.

> I also just want to make sure I haven't misled anyone about what I
> think I am doing--I am just learning both Django and REST, and fully
> admit that this work has been a stretch for me on both fronts. In
> fact, a large part of my motivation for blogging about this and
> writing the contribution was to elicit exactly the kind of response
> you gave. In my research into how to design a human facing Web
> application RESTfully, I haven't found a lot of explicit, practical
> information about how to do this. (Either that, or I just didn't
> understand it when I saw it.)

Yeah, I can sympathise with the last sentence here. It is hard to learn
and every time you think you have a handle on it, somebody with some
apparent credibility in the field comes along and says "no, that's not
right". By the way, I'm not one of those people; I just dabble in the
shallow end a lot of the time.

There's a lot of experimentation required. You seem to have approached
things in the sensible way, though, doing a lot of reading and
follow-ups. At this point, I would suggest to also try and deliberately
challenge your own assumptions. If you think you have a handle on
something, seek out viewpoints that don't seem to fit your mental model
and then try to work whether they are not quite valid or whether your
mental model needs adjusting.

You seem to be getting a handle on things and willing to stick your nose
out with real code, so don't be put off by the fact that there's a
learning curve. I don't think the curve ever flattens out completely. It
hasn't for me, yet.

Best wishes,
Malcolm


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