Re: Hypermedia vs. data (long)

> SOAP + WSDL or DAML-S would be one way to go.
> REST + X might be another
> if someone took the effort to fill in the 'X'. But that,
unfortunately,
> seems to be something that REST fans haven't been particularly willing
> to explore ... other than a few vague gestures in the direction of
> "resource modelling".

This is *not* an official RESTafarian answer, just my opinion:
* A resource model is an ontology.
For business, I use the REA (Resource-Event-Agent) business ontology
as embedded in UNCEFACT's Modeling Methodology (UMM).
The Order-Fulfillment-Settlement cycle is pretty well cooked,
should be published officially in a month or two.
* UNECE Recommended EC Agreement works for me
as interaction semantics.

RESTful implementations have been kicked around on
the rest-discuss Yahoo group, but I haven't seen a full
running example yet.

> I think that's a bit of a shame, because there are some interesting
> ideas lurking in REST and it's idioms which it might be possible to
> work up into something expressive enough to do some very interesting
> things with ... if my characterization of REST earlier is right, then
> there are surprising (to me at least) echoes of Milners Pi-calculus
> (eg. think of RESTs POST-a-URI and URI-in-a-Response idioms as
> analogous to mobility in Pi[1]).

I'm coming from a similar place.  I see a bunch of interesting ideas
and will continue to explore them until I either hit a dead end or
get something useful up and running in a real business situation.

Just giving every significant object a URI has lots of benefits,
including getting rid of a bunch of dispatchers and "correlation"
code.