Bingo! That's how I see it at least. REST is user-interaction design for automated agents. The other side benefit is that without too much extra work, you can have both humans and machines interacting with the same service via the same paradigm. That's where the "simplicity" comes in for me, not in the building of the service.
On Mon, 2006-12-11 at 23:36, Alexander Johannesen wrote: > On 12/12/06, Andrew S. Townley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > [good stuff] > > Thanks Andrew for that mail, good stuff! And thanks Jan; you're both > very, very patient. :) > > I think it's important to note how much REST actually is like the Web > itself; it's not about RPC as in you've got this big API and you need > to know a lot of shit to know what part of it to use at what time. > Throw all of that out, and let REST give you *exactly* what you can do > at that perticular time, and just trust the expert (the service). This > is no different from well-designed web applications where user > interaction in the user interface defines "what to do next." > > REST is interactive, keeps its own state and limits the API to that > context, while WS-* is just another RPC stack where you keep your own > state and you must know bucketloads on how that state impacts with the > fullness of the API. > > > Alex -- Andrew S. Townley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://atownley.org
