> 
> Advertising the URI's available from a particular rest-savvy GeoServer
> instance sounds quite useful for developers/troubleshooters, but I am
> having some trouble working out what a client for this sort of thing
> would look like.  I guess a search engine that automatically works out
> keyword searches based on these URI templates (like "workspace:topp" or
> "store:states") would be doable and useful.  Are there any other
> examples of a client out there?  (I'm just curious, more rigorous
> service advertising gets a +1 from me).
I think the main idea is putting the onus on the server to publish the 
URI structure, rather than have the client rely on a particular 
structure. Sort of the same function that a capabilities document serves 
for OGC services. It also gives us a bit of freedom to change the uri 
structure if we really push clients to "discover" the uris available via 
the discovery doc.
> 
> wrt the Discoverable interface: 
> 1) perhaps it could fully describe a rest endpoint, so that we no longer
> need the RESTMapping class?  I suspect it would be useful to keep that
> sort of metadata all bundled together, rather than keeping getMediaTypes
> in a different place from getURI.  Is there a strong case for 'hidden'
> restlets (ie, Restlet subclasses that do not implement Discoverable)?  
Yeah, I thought about suping up the RESTMapping class for this purpose 
as to have all the endpoint metadata in one place. It would probably be 
the cleanest way to do it.

As for "hidden" restlets, I think i can see a case for it. For instance 
consider the discovery of datastores in a workspace. We may wish to just 
publish the uri for workspaces in the discovery document. And then the 
content of a workspace should contain links to all the datastores. This 
is more or less the approach that Haris (developer doing the MapGuide 
rest extensions) has adopted.
> 
> 2) What is getType() vs. getMediaTypes()?  Would a ServiceType enum be
> more suitable than a String (assuming the 'type' refers to some sort of
> classification of restful services)?
Type is a bad word for it. It is more or less just an identifier, like a 
  namespace URI or something. The name Type is taken from the XRDS spec.
> 
> --
> David Winslow
> OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org/
> 


-- 
Justin Deoliveira
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Enterprise support for open source geospatial.

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