Protocol Design entries
Are Resource Packages a Good Idea?
Resource Packages is an interesting proposal from Mozilla folks for binding together bunches of related data (e.g., CSS files, JavaScript and images) and sending it in one HTTP response,...
published on Thursday, February 18 2010 ( 18 comments )
WS-REST (heh, heh)
If you haven’t seen it already, check out the Call for Papers for the First International Workshop on RESTful Design (WS-REST 2010), where I’m on the program committee, along with...
published on Friday, January 15 2010 ( 1 comment )
Will HTTP/2.0 Happen After All?
A couple of nights ago, I had a casual chat with Google’s Mike Belshe, who gave me a preview of how their “Let’s make the Web faster” effort looks...
published on Friday, November 13 2009 ( 6 comments )
Stop it with the X- Already!
Sometimes, it seems like every time somebody has a great idea for a new HTTP header, media type, or pretty much any other protocol element, they do the same...
published on Wednesday, February 18 2009 ( 19 comments )
Moving Beyond Methods in REST
Having complained before about the sad state of HTTP APIs, I’m somewhat happy to say that people seem to be getting it, producing more capable server-side and client-side tools...
published on Thursday, March 20 2008 ( 11 comments )
DAV WTF?
Not many people that I know outside of IETF circles realise that a new *DAV effort has started up; CardDAV. An address book access protocol leveraging the vCard data...
published on Monday, March 3 2008 ( 4 comments )
POST and PATCH
It’s 7am, I’m sitting in the Auckland Koru Club on my way home and reading the minor kerfuffle regarding PATCH with interest. For me, the critical difference between PATCH...
published on Sunday, February 17 2008 ( 2 comments )
Another Kind of HTTP Negotiation
Here’s one that I’ve been wondering about for a while, for the LazyWeb (HTTP Geek Edition); PUTs and POSTs can result in the creation of new resources, or changes...
published on Wednesday, February 6 2008 ( 25 comments )
Watching WADL (and other rambling thoughts)
I’m following the discussion of RESTful Web description in general, and WADL in particular, with both difficulty and interest (see Dare, Patrick and Joe’s thoughts for a nice contrast)....
published on Monday, January 21 2008 ( 1 comment )
Two HTTP Caching Extensions
We use caching extensively inside Yahoo! to improve scalability, latency and availability for back-end HTTP services, as I’ve discussed before. However, there are a few situations where the plain...
published on Wednesday, December 12 2007 ( 16 comments )
ETags, ETags, ETags
I’ve been hoping to avoid this, but ETags seem to be popping up more and more often recently. For whatever reason, people latch onto them as a litmus test...
published on Tuesday, August 7 2007 ( 8 comments )
URI Templates Redux
URI Templates -01 is now an Internet-Draft. After sitting on the spec for a while and trying to figure out an elegant solution to the encoding problem, we decided...
published on Saturday, July 28 2007 ( 5 comments )
Intelligent Design, Eames-Style
For a while, I’ve had the fairly well-known Charles Eames quote “Design depends largely on constraints” as the tagline on my blog (if you read this in a feed...
published on Thursday, May 10 2007
DOM vs. Web
Back at the W3C Technical Plenary, I argued that Working Groups need to concentrate on making more Web-friendly specifications. Here’s an example of one such lapse causing security problems...
published on Thursday, April 20 2006 ( 24 comments )
Are Namespaces (and mU) Necessary?
It’s become axiomatic in some circles — especially in WS-* land, as well as in many other uses of XML — that the preferred (or only) means of offering...
published on Friday, April 7 2006 ( 13 comments )
REST vs..?
More and more people are getting turned on to the advantages of using REST as a higher-level abstraction for networked applications, often comparing it favourably to SOAP and Web...
published on Monday, November 7 2005 ( 12 comments )
Why Just GET and POST?
Why is it that Web browsers — Amaya excluded — don’t support PUT and DELETE? After all, if there are enough VCs foolish enough to part with their money for...
published on Saturday, October 22 2005 ( 10 comments )
One Description to Bind them All? Nah.
You can describe just about anything with sufficient precision in plain English, given enough words. In practice, this doesn’t happen; specialised fields — whether science, finance or art —...
published on Friday, July 8 2005
Prefetching (again)
There’s been quite a kerfuffle over Google’s Web Accelerator, because it prefetches Web content. It’s amusing to see these issues recycle over time; in the late nineties, prefetching was...
published on Sunday, May 22 2005 ( 1 comment )
Nevermore
A while back, I wrote up a description of a pattern for avoiding messages like “click submit only once.” I didn’t do much after that, because I’ve been a...
published on Monday, March 21 2005 ( 6 comments )
Using XML in Data-Oriented Applications
So, you’ve got some data that you need to give to somebody else, and you want to use XML to do it; good for you, you’ve seen the light...
published on Wednesday, March 2 2005 ( 5 comments )
Why POST is Special
In a recent post, Don gave his take on the enlightening nature of WS-Transfer; Honestly, WS-Transfer has been in the oven for quite a while. It’s been interesting to...
published on Sunday, October 10 2004 ( 11 comments )
On Jargon and Applicability
Alfred Marshall, who is credited with turning economics from a sideline to a proper discipline of its own, had this to say: (1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done.... (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life.
published on Thursday, August 19 2004 ( 1 comment )
The ‘Document’ in Document-Oriented Messaging
(Another instalment in “XML Heresies.”) One of the foundations of most vendors’ approach to Web services is called document-oriented messaging. This is the notion that interoperability is improved by describing...
published on Thursday, August 5 2004 ( 10 comments )
SOAP: Protocol or Format?
Way back when the XML Protocol Working Group started kicking around, Henrik and I had a long-running, low-level “discusssion” about whether SOAP was a protocol or a format. Henrik won,...
published on Wednesday, June 30 2004 ( 2 comments )
Use Cases for Web Description Formats
One thing about Web description formats that hasn’t seen much discussion yet is how people intend to use them. The WSDL Working Group has a Usage Scenarios document and a...
published on Monday, June 14 2004
XML Infoset, RDF and Data Modelling
I’ve been talking with a few people about my previous assertion that the Infoset is a bad abstraction for data modelling, and my subsequent post about the informational properties of...
published on Friday, May 28 2004 ( 5 comments )
Informational Properties of Infosets
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the influences that using the Infoset has on the information you place in it. To put it another way: if you work with XML at...
published on Wednesday, May 12 2004 ( 6 comments )
Boo!
Without pointing fingers, some people have a bee in their collective bonnet about the dangers of allowing binary content to be represented in XML, care of XOP. Others are up...
published on Wednesday, May 5 2004 ( 4 comments )
Stupid Compression Tricks
I’m watching a company called Riverbed with interest, because they just released a new product, “Steelhead”. In a nutshell, it’s IP datagram compression done with a shared, dynamic dictionary. That’s...
published on Saturday, May 1 2004
How do we use SOAP Headers?
Way back when in the XML Protocol Working Group, one of the concerns that came up was the processing model for SOAP headers. In particular, while SOAP 1.2 does a...
published on Tuesday, April 27 2004 ( 3 comments )
Using WebDAV as a Description Format for REST
In the past, I’ve talked about reusing WSDL as a format for describing Web resources, as well as coming up with a bespoke format. One path that I’ve overlooked so...
published on Tuesday, April 27 2004 ( 6 comments )
Sean’s Words of Wisdom
Sean McGrath always has carefully considered positions, and he hits it out of the ballpark with this one. A few thoughts; Eventually though, to fully realise RESTian SOA we need...
published on Tuesday, April 20 2004 ( 1 comment )
Asynchrony: There Is No Spoon
One of the things that people find compelling about Web services is its promise of asynchrony. “HTTP is only request/response, and therefore synchronous; it’s terrible for long-lived business processes, where...
published on Monday, April 19 2004 ( 1 comment )
Describing Generative Identifiers in WSDL
To use WSDL to describe RESTful interactions, you need some way of accommodating generative resource identifiers. In a nutshell, this means some part of the URI is dynamic. For example,...
published on Friday, April 16 2004
Five Favourite Protocol Design Papers
Lots of papers come and go over the years; take a look at any tech conference, online bibliographies (even subject-specific ones; Webbib is a favourite), and you’ll be inundated. However,...
published on Thursday, April 15 2004 ( 4 comments )
A(nother) Description Format for REST
I’ve talked before about describing RESTful Web resources, going as far as prototyping a new format. That work was predicated on the assumption that WSDL wasn’t adequate. However, Dave Orchard...
published on Wednesday, April 14 2004 ( 5 comments )
Messages vs. Files
Jon Udell is thinking about the benefits of data being globally available, rather than localised to a machine. I’m in complete agreement; in the last two years, I’ve used Linux,...
published on Saturday, February 7 2004 ( 1 comment )
Decentralised Registration
Wouldn’t it be great if, whenever a business, government organization or just the guy down the block came up with a new format for their documents, they could easily get...
published on Monday, January 12 2004 ( 2 comments )
Extensibility and Interoperability
In his blog, Sean McGrath wonders about two potentially competing faces of standards; extensibility and interoperability. If “compliance” to X is open-ended via an extensiblity mechanism, then “X-compliant” means very...
published on Saturday, January 3 2004
Loose Coupling, Late Binding and REST
Mark Baker says that REST is SOA + late binding. While I see the truth in this, I think it's pretty orthogonal, and it's not that compelling for most SOAish...
published on Friday, October 3 2003
Click Submit Only Once
I shudder when I see these words. Everyone I’ve asked has, at least once, gotten two orders of something online (personally, I’ve had the SonyEricsson store ship *three* duplicate orders);...
published on Saturday, September 13 2003 ( 9 comments )
Bees and Ants
The W3C Semantic Web wiki has an entry called 'BeesAndAnts' that very effectively conveys something that I've been trying to articulate for a while (and, as usual, failing). It's not...
published on Tuesday, June 24 2003 ( 2 comments )
Don Box on Tolerance
Don talks about the evils of tolerance in receiving implementations, and I say Amen, brother! Preach! The classic approach works when there are relatively few implementators; however, when the whole...
published on Tuesday, August 20 2002