[microformats-discuss] Re: XHTML-REST -> APIs

[Luke Arno]

On 10/14/05, Ryan King <ryan at technorati.com> wrote:
> On Oct 14, 2005, at 1:49 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > On Oct 13, 2005, at 12:56 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
> >
> >> Is this making sense yet? :-)  I'm still filling it in, but
> >> hopefully people can follow along...
> >
> > Thanks to all of you who showed up last night for dinner.  I've
> > updated the base accordingly:
> >
> > http://microformats.org/wiki/rest-brainstorming
> >
> > Its cool to see Dimitri and I have been thinking along similar
> > lines.  Two major issues:
> >
> > a) Its the data[base], stupid!
> > [no offense, just an American slang phrase, sorry]
> >
> > I realized that a series of key-value pairs following a common
> > schema are merely (duh) database tables, with URIs being 'primary
> > keys' allowing relations between them.  The difference is that we
> > don't need to completely describe all the data ourselves -- we
> > merely provide the basic info and let the server handle all the
> > normalization and default values.
> >
> > Given that, I propose the following normative URI format for XHTML-
> > REST:
> >
> > http://host:port/base/table/record
>
> FWIW, this is pretty much what Ruby on Rails does by default.
>

Yup.

I use a little home-brew Python framework and have (mostly)
implemented something similar.  The O.R. mapper can expose
its CRUD operations via POST GET PUT and DELETE respectively.
Additionally it can perform its CRUD operations via HTTP. This
way its instances can be used as clients, servers, and
intermediaries (should be nice for caching).

I will try to find time to finish this and will use these microformats.

- Luke