Re: Re: REST is Kafkarchitecture

Erik Wilde <[email protected]> Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:14:23 -0700

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.web.services.rest
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

hello stan.

> I love this line of thinking. I confess I spend a lot of time thinking up these kind of examples. This is about the only
> place where I don't feel weird admitting that. Can I submit my favorite example?

that's a good one! and essentially i guess you can see an airport as a
loosely coupled decentralized bureaucracy apparatus that isn't all that
different from 19th century offices (well, except for the airplanes
instead of horse carriages, of course).

my favorite "RESTful airport" anecdote: i once lost my ticket (back in
the days, when you still had to have a paper ticket for flying) and the
airline people honestly wanted me to buy a complete new one, telling me
(in REST terms) that the ticket state was all on my side and they did
not have any record of it. which of course wasn't true and just a matter
of policy, but that was their explanation. they ended up creating the
obvious wrong explanation for their policy (which of course was
implemented for money reasons, and not for technical reasons). you
could, btw, fairly easily create passenger systems that would work like
this, only keeping anonymized passenger state (for keeping passenger
count) on the service side. again, a fun design exercise to think about,
but i think the TSA might have something against implementing a system
like that.

cheers,

dret.