Re: Resource definition

Mark Baker wrote:

> One doesn't need to talk about a switch, or the movement of a switch, or
> even a toggleSwitch() method, in order to effect a state change with the
> bulb, because the interaction style is one of *state transfer*; if I
> want to turn the bulb on, I just do a HTTP PUT containing a
> representation of the "on state" to the URI identifying the lightbulb.


Representing action as state transfer is unnatural in many situations and
wholly impractical in others. For example: consider a TroutPond resource
which contains an arbitrary number of Trout. How, pray, do you render
the action RemoveAllDeadTrout() as a state transfer?  One could,
I imagine, HTTP GET the entire pond state, compute the subset pond
containing only non-dead fish, and then HTTP PUT the result, but
idempotency, scalability, and common sense would seem to rule that out....