“Design depends largely on constraints.” — Charles Eames
Tuesday, 25 October 2011
A lot of bits have been used over on the OpenStack list recently about versioning the HTTP APIs they provide. This over-long and rambling post summarises my current thoughts on the topic, both as background for that discussion, as well...
this entry’s page (13 comments)
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Since joining Rackspace to help out with OpenStack, one of the hot topics of conversation I’ve been involved in has been extensibility and versioning. I think most of my readers (yes, all six of you) are fairly familiar with, if...
this entry’s page (11 comments)
Wednesday, 24 August 2011
It used to be that when you registered a media type, a URI scheme, a HTTP header or another protocol element on the Internet, it was an opaque string that was a unique identifier, nothing more. Sure, there are some...
this entry’s page (4 comments)
Friday, 23 July 2010
Since SPDY has surfaced, one of the oft-repeated topics has been its use of TLS; namely that the SPDY guys have said that they’ll require all traffic to go over it. Mike Belshe dives into all of the details...
this entry’s page (7 comments)
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Steve Souders and others have been working for a while on HAR, a HTTP Archive format. I love the idea behind HAR, but as I expressed on the mailing list (so far no response), I have a hard time...
this entry’s page (8 comments)
Thursday, 18 February 2010
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, rather than many, as browsers typically do. Intuitively, this seems...
this entry’s page (18 comments)
Friday, 15 January 2010
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 many of the usual suspects. Submissions due February 8, 2010,...
this entry’s page (1 comment)
Friday, 13 November 2009
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 at HTTP itself. SPDY (nee FLIP) is an alternate application...
this entry’s page (6 comments)
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
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 thing. Rather than trying to figure out how to fit...
this entry’s page (19 comments)
Thursday, 20 March 2008
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 for exposing the full range of the protocol; some frameworks...
this entry’s page (11 comments)
Monday, 3 March 2008
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 format. The Internet-draft draft-daboo-carddav will be the starting point. The...
this entry’s page (4 comments)
Sunday, 17 February 2008
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 and POST is generality; PATCH is a generic method (as...
this entry’s page (2 comments)
Wednesday, 6 February 2008
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 to the state of existing ones. The response to both...
this entry’s page (25 comments)
Monday, 21 January 2008
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). Difficulty because there’s so much of it, and it’s hard...
this entry’s page (1 comment)
Wednesday, 12 December 2007
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 vanilla HTTP caching model doesn’t quite do the trick. Rather...
this entry’s page (16 comments)
Tuesday, 7 August 2007
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 for RESTfulness, as the defining factor of HTTP’s caching model,...
this entry’s page (8 comments)
Saturday, 28 July 2007
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 to take the simple route and see how it sticks....
this entry’s page (5 comments)
Thursday, 10 May 2007
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 aggregator, you’ll have to go to one of the HTML...
Thursday, 20 April 2006
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 on today’s Web. Safety in HTTP HTTP methods have a...
this entry’s page (24 comments)
Friday, 7 April 2006
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 extensibility is through URI-based namespaces, along with a flag to...
this entry’s page (13 comments)
Monday, 7 November 2005
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 services. However, as many have pointed out, this is a...
this entry’s page (12 comments)
Saturday, 22 October 2005
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 something like Flock, surely we could at least support all...
this entry’s page (10 comments)
Friday, 8 July 2005
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 — develop specialised jargon as a shorthand for concepts that are...
Sunday, 22 May 2005
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 one of the biggest areas of research in Web caching....
this entry’s page (1 comment)
Monday, 21 March 2005
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 bit busy, and because I wanted to do some implementation...
this entry’s page (6 comments)
Wednesday, 2 March 2005
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 / hopped on the bandwagon / drunk the Kool-Aid. At...
this entry’s page (5 comments)
Sunday, 10 October 2004
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 see people’s reaction to it. Stage 1. What good is...
this entry’s page (11 comments)
Thursday, 19 August 2004
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.
this entry’s page (1 comment)
Thursday, 5 August 2004
(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 a protocol in terms of the artefacts that are exchanged...
this entry’s page (10 comments)
Wednesday, 30 June 2004
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, and SOAP is known as a protocol* today (despite the...
this entry’s page (2 comments)
Monday, 14 June 2004
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 Requirements document, but unfortunately they only talk about the kinds...
Friday, 28 May 2004
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 the Infoset. The feedback has been positive, especially regarding the...
this entry’s page (5 comments)
Wednesday, 12 May 2004
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 the Infoset level, what tools are you given to express...
this entry’s page (6 comments)
Wednesday, 5 May 2004
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 in arms about re-inventing HTTP in SOAP, courtesy of the...
this entry’s page (4 comments)
Saturday, 1 May 2004
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 right, it has a disk on each end of the...
Tuesday, 27 April 2004
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 good job of specifying how that model operates, a key...
this entry’s page (3 comments)
Tuesday, 27 April 2004
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 far is reusing WebDAV to describe Web resources. The WebDAV...
this entry’s page (6 comments)
Tuesday, 20 April 2004
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 to get linguistic determinism working for us, not against us....
this entry’s page (1 comment)
Monday, 19 April 2004
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 the server needs to contact the client at some arbitrary...
this entry’s page (1 comment)
Friday, 16 April 2004
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, with HTTP I might describe an address book where someone...
Thursday, 15 April 2004
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, a few rise above the rest (no pun intended) and...
this entry’s page (4 comments)
Wednesday, 14 April 2004
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 has been looking at this in the WSDL WG, and...
this entry’s page (5 comments)
Saturday, 7 February 2004
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, Windows and Mac OSX on the desktop, leading me to...
this entry’s page (1 comment)
Monday, 12 January 2004
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 a media type, so that the format would be a...
this entry’s page (2 comments)
Saturday, 3 January 2004
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 little when it comes to interoperability. This is the constant...
Friday, 3 October 2003
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 folks. This is because their use cases are machines talking...
Saturday, 13 September 2003
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); “Click Submit Only Once” is intended to stop that. The...
this entry’s page (9 comments)
Tuesday, 24 June 2003
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 about the Semantic Web in my mind, so much as...
this entry’s page (2 comments)
Tuesday, 20 August 2002
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 world implements a protocol (whether it's SOAP or HTML or...