Earthly Powers

JSR-311 and the republicans

It is never pretty when politics and technology collide and it is not everyday one is compared to Karl Rove or Dick Cheney :-)

Putting politics aside i think Elliotte Rusty Harold and others make some good technical points. I hope Marc's blog in response assuages concerns.

IMHO this is all about developer productivity: enabling developers to rapidly build Web(re: HTTP)-based applications that utilize the best designed bits of the Web (namely the bits that conform to the REST architectural style).

Marc shows an example in his blog of what he has in mind. A 'runtime' that deploys the 'Widget' POJO could potentially handle many things so the developer does not need to, such as:

• Responding to a HEAD request.
• Responding with a 405 (Method Not Allowed), and including the Allow header field, to a DELETE request.
• Responding with a 304 (Not Modified) to a GET request if the resource has not been modified.
• Responding with a 406 (Not Acceptable) to a GET request if an Accept request-header field does not contain application/widgets+xml.
  
• Redirecting to normalized URIs, for example http://blah.com////context////widgest///1234 to http://blah.com/context/widgest/1234, for cache friendly behaviour.
  

I have been wanting to work on such an API and implementation for about 5 years! Back when Marc and I were members of the XML technology group in Sun we and other group members had some interesting discussions about the Web and the REST architectural style, which i think was common in general with the Web zeitgeist around that time. Now the Web zeitgeist is back and so are we :-)

Posted at 03:49PM Feb 15, 2007 by Paul Sandoz in REST  |  Comments[0]