The audio interview mentioned in my review of the new Leonard Richard and Sam Ruby book, RESTful Web Services, is now available at ITConversations. This one presented a bit of an audio challenge because Leonard speaks loudly and Sam speaks very softly. In the course of working on this show, ITConversations’ ace audio engineer Paul Figgiani reviewed my recording setup and we discovered that what I thought was a mix-minus configuration actually wasn’t. So thanks to Paul it is now, and things should be sounding better from now on.
This week’s show is timely, given the recent remarks about REST by the Burton Group’s Anne Thomas Manes. Predictably, that led to another round of WS-* naysaying. For what it’s worth, I stand by what I’ve been saying all along, in a variety of places including this InfoWorld cover story: there’s WS-Heavy, there’s WS-Lite, and for every situation there’s a WS-JustRight that may rely on elements of one, the other, or both. The Richardson/Ruby book brings much-needed clarity to the WS-Lite end of the tolerance continuum, and that’s a great thing. But when we celebrate one end of the continuum, why must we deprecate the other? As Mike Champion recently noted:
The WS technologies are taking hold, deep down in the infrastructure, doing the mundane but mission critical work for which they were designed.
There are plenty of nails to be hammered and, thankfully, we’ve got more than one hammer.
Jon – worth checking that quote from Mike Champions; it’s either a typo or shades of ‘New York New York’. Unless, of course, he just *really* meant it, perhaps as an affirmation-style mantra…
Thanks David. Nope, the duplication was a cut/paste glitch :-)
I found the point about the difference between , and ; in URI’s interesting. It seems to me that there’s a striking similarity to a Python best practice, which says that tuples should be used to build data structures of sorts by combining (possibly differently typed) objects, while lists are generally variable sized containers which hold objects which are all of the same type. E.g., in Python, I would represent longitude, latitude as a tuple (longitude, latitude), while I would have the color components of a certain paint mix in a list [‘red’, ‘blue’, ‘green’] (or even [(255, 0, 0), (0, 255, 0), (0, 0, 255)], to combine both forms).
Just thought this was an interesting parallel.