Tuesday, 22 March 2011
Your REST worries have ended.
Now, you can test any URL to instantly determine if it’s RESTful. You’re welcome....
this entry’s page (2 comments)
Web Services Entries
Friday, 15 January 2010
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 many of the usual suspects. Submissions due February 8, 2010,...
this entry’s page (1 comment)
Monday, 27 October 2008
Dev-Friendly Web Caching
Ryan Tomayko announces Rack::Cache, a HTTP cache for Ruby’s generic Web API; The basic goal is standards-based HTTP caching that scales down to the early stages of a project, development environments, light to medium trafficked sites, stuff like that....
this entry’s page (4 comments)
Thursday, 16 October 2008
/site-meta
Metadata discovery is a nagging problem that’s been hanging around the Web for a while. There have been a few stabs at this problem (including at least one by yours truly), but no real progress. This is both unfortunate...
this entry’s page (17 comments)
Friday, 4 July 2008
The WS-Empire Strikes Back... feebly
Here’s a gem on a little-used mailing list: As most of you know, over the last several years fairly good progress has been made on standardizing Web services. Many Web services specifications have, in fact, been standardized in W3C...
this entry’s page (9 comments)
Thursday, 15 May 2008
Atom gets a new audience
Huh. The Atom Format RFC has been out for a while, and as one of the authors, I get the odd mail now and again asking a question or just saying “thanks.” In the last week or two, however, there’s...
this entry’s page (1 comment)
Thursday, 20 March 2008
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 for exposing the full range of the protocol; some frameworks...
this entry’s page (11 comments)
Monday, 3 March 2008
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 format. The Internet-draft draft-daboo-carddav will be the starting point. The...
this entry’s page (4 comments)
Sunday, 17 February 2008
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 and POST is generality; PATCH is a generic method (as...
this entry’s page (2 comments)
Wednesday, 6 February 2008
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 to the state of existing ones. The response to both...
this entry’s page (25 comments)
Monday, 21 January 2008
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). Difficulty because there’s so much of it, and it’s hard...
this entry’s page (1 comment)
Friday, 4 January 2008
Cache Channels
The stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error extensions aren’t the only fiddling we’ve been doing with the HTTP caching model. Now that Squid 2.7 is starting to see daylight, I can explain about a much more ambitious project — Cache Channels. In...
this entry’s page (4 comments)
Wednesday, 12 December 2007
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 vanilla HTTP caching model doesn’t quite do the trick. Rather...
this entry’s page (16 comments)
Sunday, 9 December 2007
Why Revise HTTP?
I haven’t talked about it here much, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last year and a half working with people in the IETF to get RFC2616 — the HTTP specification — revised. That effort...
this entry’s page (9 comments)
Friday, 2 November 2007
WADL Documentation XSLT Updated
I've updated the WADL documentation stylesheet, primarily to; Fix a bug with finding and displaying XML Schema Make it compatible with xsltproc (and hopefully most other XSLT1.0 processors that understand EXSLT node-set) Generate valid XHTML The hard part was...
Saturday, 8 September 2007
5005
Feed Paging and Archiving (nee Feed History) has finally made it to a standards-track RFC. For many non-traditional (read: non-blog) applications of Atom, I think archived feeds in particular are going to be vital. I’m already using it in...
this entry’s page (3 comments)
Tuesday, 7 August 2007
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 for RESTfulness, as the defining factor of HTTP’s caching model,...
this entry’s page (8 comments)
Saturday, 28 July 2007
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 to take the simple route and see how it sticks....
this entry’s page (5 comments)
Wednesday, 20 June 2007
The State of Proxy Caching
A while back I wrote up the state of browser caching, after writing a quick-and-dirty XHR-based test page, with the idea that if people know how their content is handled by common implementations, they’d be able to trust caches...
this entry’s page (13 comments)
Tuesday, 1 May 2007
httperf rev
Martin Arlitt makes an exciting announcement; It is my pleasure to announce two new versions of httperf: 0.8.1 and 0.9.0. version 0.8.1 fixes the known bugs in version 0.8, which was released almost 7 years ago. The primary new...
Sunday, 29 April 2007
Squid is My Service Bus
The QCon presentation (slides) was ostensibly about how we use HTTP for services within Yahoo’s Media Group. When I started thinking about the talk, however, I quickly concluded that everyone’s heard enough about the high-level benefits of HTTP and...
this entry’s page (6 comments)
Thursday, 5 April 2007
WWW2007 Developers’ Track
We’ve announced the program for this years’ Developers’ Track, and I’m very excited about the lineup. For example, Ryan Boyd from Google will be presenting about GData right before Pasha Sadri talks about Yahoo! Pipes. These are two cutting-edge...
Tuesday, 27 February 2007
REST Issues, Real and Imagined
I think that most of the debate about REST focuses on the wrong things, leading developers down the garden path at the expense of their productivity and the success of their projects. Time and time again, I’ve seen folks...
this entry’s page (14 comments)
Wednesday, 7 February 2007
Pipes!
Yahoo! (finally!) released Pipes as a beta today; congrats to the very talented team that put this together. Niall gives the geeks-eye view, and to be clear, this is not going to be the next great consumer Web site;...
this entry’s page (8 comments)
Monday, 4 December 2006
SOA Jumps Shark
Uche calls it; So the SOA wars are heating up. More and more smart people are pointing out that the emperor has no clothes; but stakes is still crazy high. Some folks haven’t yet made all their money from...
this entry’s page (2 comments)
Thursday, 30 November 2006
Schema for JSON
One of the perceived deficiencies of JSON is that it doesn’t have a schema language. I say “perceived” because the problems that a schema language brings often outweigh the benefits; after all, look at the mess that XML Schema...
this entry’s page (12 comments)
Tuesday, 17 October 2006
Wanted: HTTP Yahoo!s
My team at Yahoo! is looking for a mid-level developer (5-10 years experience) to help build our HTTP/REST toolkit, among other things. The job is mostly coding Perl and PHP, with some C or C++ skills desirable. There’s also...
Friday, 13 October 2006
Does the Enterprise (Vendor) Get the Web?
A couple of interesting things have happened recently; first, Jonathan Marsh has a new job; WSO2 is a year-old startup which provides support services around Apache’s Axis 2 Web services application server. The company’s CEO, Sanjiva Weerawarana, on Saturday...
this entry’s page (3 comments)
Wednesday, 13 September 2006
Some Questions for Software Vendors
Everyone seems to be gushing about Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise. While any headway is good in the horrible landscape that is Intellectual Property, my initial reaction is that it — like most such vendor promises — is too little,...
Thursday, 22 June 2006
Bringing Back the Link - With a Twist
Recently, there’s been a resurgence for the Link element in HTML; everything from Microformats to Atom autodiscovery is using it. This isn’t surprising; as machines start processing Web documents more, it’s necessary to use hyperlinks — the foundation of...
this entry’s page (8 comments)
Thursday, 25 May 2006
Web Services are Dead, Long Live Web Services
When I joined Yahoo, one of the biggest adjustments I had to make was to their use of “Web Services”. There, that phrase means any kind of machine-to-machine communication using HTTP; SOAP isn’t assumed (or preferred). This is diametrically...
this entry’s page (10 comments)
Tuesday, 16 May 2006
Caching Web 2.0
I just finished my XTech presentation, “Web 2.0 on Speed”. here are the slides [pdf]; I’m going to try to s5 them soon. There isn’t much new in this talk; it’s just a synthesis of a few different observations;...
this entry’s page (7 comments)
Thursday, 11 May 2006
Yaron Uncloaks!
Yaron publicly says what he’s doing at Microsoft (scroll down); I hear that HTTP stuff is pretty cool. If anyone cares you can peruse a bunch of blog entries on my website (www.goland.org) where I walk through a number...
this entry’s page (5 comments)
Wednesday, 10 May 2006
Vendor-pires
Anne-Thomas Manes extolls the virtues of WS-*; The single, most important feature that inspires my enthusiasm about WS-* is that it has universal support from all the major vendors. Ah, there we are; major vendors. What she’s basically saying...
this entry’s page (18 comments)
Sunday, 23 April 2006
XTech
It’s official; I’ve got a last-minute slot at XTech, talking about all things Web caching....
this entry’s page (2 comments)
Friday, 14 April 2006
Another WS-*
A friend in the trenches put me on to the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Paging through the quotes, there are a few that are especially apropos; [X-wings are approaching Death Star] Wedge Antilles (Red 2):...
Friday, 7 April 2006
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 extensibility is through URI-based namespaces, along with a flag to...
this entry’s page (13 comments)
Thursday, 6 April 2006
What good is SOAP to HTTP?
I’m a little confused by Mark Baker’s stance regarding SOAP; he seems to encourage the Web services world to use SOAP on top of HTTP in a fashion compatible with HTTP. As I asked Chris Ferris recently, what’s the...
this entry’s page (3 comments)
Monday, 20 March 2006
Don’s False Choice
True to form, Don’s using his witty charm and good looks (such as they are ;) to shape discussion of a topic… in this case, REST, where he splits the RESTifarian world into two; “hi” and “lo.” To get...
this entry’s page (9 comments)
Wednesday, 15 March 2006
WS-Transfer, WAKA and the Web
Microsoft and friends (of the keep your enemy closer variety, I suspect) have submitted WS-Transfer to the W3C. I found the Team comment interesting; e.g., WS-Transfer can therefore be seen as an underlying protocol-independent version of HTTP, i.e. bringing...
this entry’s page (10 comments)
Monday, 23 January 2006
How Web-Ready is XMLHttpRequest?
I’ve been playing around with some ideas that use XMLHttpRequest recently, but I keep on bumping up against implementation inconsistencies on IE vs. Safari vs. Opera vs. Mozilla. Although the interface exposed is pretty much the same, what it...
this entry’s page (29 comments)
Monday, 7 November 2005
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 services. However, as many have pointed out, this is a...
this entry’s page (12 comments)
Wednesday, 10 August 2005
Separating the Data Model from its Serialisation
For some time, I’ve noticed that people defining XML formats spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the structure of the format. This is especially apparent in standards working groups, where hours — no, days — can be...
this entry’s page (11 comments)
Monday, 8 August 2005
HTTP Performance (again)
Some folks at IONA have written a paper entitled Where HTTP Fails SOAP. I had a chance to look at this before I got it published, and their conclusions make a lot of sense — if you accept the...
this entry’s page (1 comment)
Friday, 8 July 2005
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 — develop specialised jargon as a shorthand for concepts that are...
Monday, 27 June 2005
Perspectives on the Addressing Experiment
I don’t talk much about it here, but I’m honoured to be the Chair of the W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group. This is something of an experiment for the W3C, so I gave an update on its progress...
this entry’s page (2 comments)
Tuesday, 24 May 2005
Web Description at the W3C
The W3C has just started a mailing list for discussion of Web description formats; This mailing list is dedicated to discussion of Web description languages based on URI/IRI and HTTP, and aligned with the Web and REST Architecture. Unlike...
this entry’s page (2 comments)
Wednesday, 2 March 2005
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 / hopped on the bandwagon / drunk the Kool-Aid. At...
this entry’s page (5 comments)
Monday, 7 February 2005
The Map is Not the Territory
Werner makes an excellent point; [W]e need to continue to take care that we do not consider The Model to be The Truth. The web based internet is a massive organic process that is similar to Nature, and we...
this entry’s page (3 comments)
Sunday, 23 January 2005
WS-Who's on First?
There are MEPs in SOAP and MEPs in WSDL. WS-Addressing doesn't have MEPs, but it does allow you to create patterns of messages.Meanwhile, SOAP has bindings and WSDL has bindings, and WS-Addressing have bindings too. But, a SOAP binding binds an underlying transport, a WSDL binding binds an abstract interface, and an Addressing binding binds abstract properties.That's not the properties in SOAP, by the way, which aren't exactly the same as the properties in WSDL.
this entry’s page (1 comment)
Wednesday, 5 January 2005
Melbourne
Since the W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group is visiting my (sort of) home town in a couple of weeks, I've updated the Opinionated Guide to Melbourne that I sometimes give to people by e-mail and put it on the Web. /me dons flame-retardant suit...
this entry’s page (6 comments)
Sunday, 10 October 2004
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 see people’s reaction to it. Stage 1. What good is...
this entry’s page (11 comments)
Wednesday, 29 September 2004
Is there a Web Services Architecture?
As I'm sure many others were, I was intrigued to see that Microsoft published an Introduction to the Web Services Architecture the other week. Unlike their usual collaborative selves, they did this without any partners, co-authors or even acknowledgement to the outside world; it reads as if Web services is a beast that was bred purely within the gates of Redmond.
this entry’s page (3 comments)
Monday, 27 September 2004
The ‘Web’ in Web Services
I was very interested to see the reaction that people had to WS-Transfer over the last few days. While the SOAP Resource Representation Header had opprobrium heaped upon it (""), Transfer passed by with nothing more than a few nodding heads and people saying "aha." In my view, WS-Transfer deserves a lot more of that criticism; if anything, the Resource Representation Header tries to supplant MIME, not HTTP.
this entry’s page (2 comments)
Thursday, 5 August 2004
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 a protocol in terms of the artefacts that are exchanged...
this entry’s page (10 comments)
Thursday, 1 July 2004
Come One, Come All
The W3C Workshop on Constraints and Capabilities for Web Services promises to be a quiet, calm, tightly-scoped discussion of a well-understood topic, lacking any controversy whatsoever. What else could possibly result from mixing up Web services and metadata? Make sure...
Wednesday, 30 June 2004
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, and SOAP is known as a protocol* today (despite the...
this entry’s page (2 comments)
Monday, 14 June 2004
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 Requirements document, but unfortunately they only talk about the kinds...
Friday, 7 May 2004
XopParser.py 0.2
To help inform discussion of XOP (and to save Sam the trouble ;), I’ve put together a quick-and-dirty (we’re talking two hours) XOP parser in Python. It isn’t particularly efficient, nor is it well-tested or robust; it’s only to demonstrate...
Tuesday, 27 April 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 good job of specifying how that model operates, a key...
this entry’s page (3 comments)
Tuesday, 27 April 2004
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 far is reusing WebDAV to describe Web resources. The WebDAV...
this entry’s page (6 comments)
Tuesday, 20 April 2004
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 to get linguistic determinism working for us, not against us....
this entry’s page (1 comment)
Monday, 19 April 2004
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 the server needs to contact the client at some arbitrary...
this entry’s page (1 comment)
Friday, 16 April 2004
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, with HTTP I might describe an address book where someone...
Wednesday, 14 April 2004
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 has been looking at this in the WSDL WG, and...
this entry’s page (5 comments)
Monday, 29 March 2004
Behind the Scenes at Your (very) Local Music Store
Aaron Swartz has started to document the iTunes Music Store; this is a good example of a non-browser, cross-platform application reusing HTTP. It would be interesting to see the interface documented on a per-URI basis. Now, if they’d just allow...
Saturday, 14 February 2004
XOP and MTOM
The XML Protocol Working Group (of which I’m a member) has released a first draft of XOP, XML-binary Optimised Packaging, and a revised draft of MTOM, the Message Transmission Optimisation Mechanism, that leverages XOP. In a nutshell, XOP is an...
this entry’s page (3 comments)
Thursday, 30 October 2003
DIME is dead.
'cause Gudge says so, and as we all know, Gudge is always right....
Monday, 18 August 2003
Web Services
If you're lost in a sea of specs, pundits and opinions, might I suggest two very well-written, thoughtful papers: Principles of Service Oriented Integration by Sean McGrath at Propylon [pdf] Putting the "Web" in Web Services by Steve Vinoski at...
Tuesday, 24 June 2003
SOAP1.2
We finally did it. More than two years ago, I went to North Carolina almost by accident; at the last minute I asked David Fallside if I could come to the first meeting because it sounded "interesting." One of the...