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On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 06:48:14PM -0500, Michael Champion wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 22:00:10 -0500, Michael Champion wrote
>
> > I maintain that there is no deep architectural principle here --
> > either approach exposes essentially the same order of complexity from
> > the service provider to the service consumer.
>
> As is often the case, David Megginson
> http://www.megginson.com/blogs/quoderat/archives/2005/03/31/rest-and-rss/
> makes a similar point far more eloquently : "REST offloads complexity
> from the protocol (HTTP) to the content (XML). That makes REST look
> simple as long as you focus only on the protocol, but RESTafarians
> cannot get away forever with leaving the content format for data
> unspecified."
With all due respect to both of you, that simply isn't the case. The
data is *identical* in the examples I gave, so there's no place for
that additional complexity to go. It's *gone* because an architectural
tradeoff was made; simplicity for efficiency. I might as well quote Roy
at this point;
"By applying the software engineering principle of generality to the
component interface, the overall system architecture is simplified
[...] The trade-off, though, is that a uniform interface degrades
efficiency, since information is transferred in a standardized form
rather than one which is specific to an application's needs."
-- http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm#sec_5_1_5
Mark.
--
Mark Baker. Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA. http://www.markbaker.ca
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