Re: A viewpoint on harvesting REST

On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 10:35:49AM -0400, Newcomer, Eric wrote:
> It's also important to recognize use cases for Web services that essentially have nothing to do with the Web.  

Eric, I think it's critical that we get past this misconception.

The use cases for Web services are just use cases - problems that need
an automatable solution.  The Web/hypertext/REST/whatever is one form of
solution for those problems.  RPC is another.  Tuple spaces are another.
Basically, pick any computationally complete architecture, and every use
case has a solution that respects the constraints of that architecture.

Of course, some of those solutions may be horrid, because no one
architecture is suitable for all problems.  For example, you couldn't
reasonably implement a telnet-like system with REST.  But we haven't yet
had the discussion about what sorts of problems REST is good at, or not
good at, so it's really premature to conclude that the Web has nothing
to do with Web services or our use cases.

IMO, REST is completely suitable for every use case and usage scenario
(except for the ones that call out specific technologies) in our usage
scenarios document.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile (formerly Planetfred)
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.               [email protected]
http://www.markbaker.ca        http://www.idokorro.com