[microformats-discuss] REST Re: FYI: two posting about the Semantic Web, the "SynWeb", scraping and microformats

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

HI Christopher,

On Oct 25, 2005, at 1:09 AM, Christopher St John wrote:
> On 10/25/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar <drernie at opendarwin.org> wrote:
>> My point is rather that I would prefer the Google Maps Web Service
>> API <http://www.google.com/apis/maps/> to be trivially discoverable
>> by using the Google Maps HTML front-end <http://www.google.com/lochp?
>> hl=en&tab=wl&q=>, rather than being a completely different service
>> using XML or RDF. That's all.
>
> I'm reading this as a preference for the API to be RESTian, apologies
> and please ignore if I've misread...

Um, not necessarily, but on the other hand I do have that preference,  
so let's go with this...

> I've used the Google maps API and would disagree strongly that a
> simple RESTian front-end would make a good replacement. The API
> is actually a fairly complex chunk of Javascript that does more than
> just ask for a particular map.

Okay, I'll accept that my naive answer may not be correct.  But, I'd  
love to get an understanding of what exactly is being done, and why  
it is not amenable to REST.

> If nothing else, I suspect URL length
> limitations would kick in well before you ran out of relevant
> parameters.

Huh?   I'm a little confused by this statement.   Last I checked,  
REST didn't require you to stuff everything in URLs.  Heck, even HTML  
doesn't -- that's what MIME multipart is for, isn't it?


> SOAP (or XML-RPC, or whatever regular-old-RPC mechanism you
> want to pick) really is better for some things.  Maybe a couple of
> anti-patterns would be appropriate?

I'd love to see an anti-pattern that demonstrates a *problem domain*  
is better expressed in SOAP than in REST.   My understanding is that  
the two have been proven formally equivalent, though they encode  
things very differently.

Though, to be honest, this is getting a little far afield from  
microformats.  Tantek, how's the new list coming? :-)

-- Ernie P.

>
>
> -cks
>
>
> -----
> Christopher St. John
> http://artofsystems.blogspot.com
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------------
Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. <drernie at opendarwin.org>
Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker
Probe-Hacker blog: http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/