Authentication has been bane of my existence lately. By which I mean,
it is complicated and interesting and I am loving every minute of it
(but, as you can see, I am not going to let that stop me from complaining about it). However
tonight I have run into an authentication problem that I am not [...]
Patrick Mueller contemplates whether or not we really need URIs in our documents1. This is a pretty common question in
my experience. This question comes up because it is not always
immediately obvious just how powerful embedding links in documents is.
What Mr. Mueller suggests is that if you have a client that needs
account information for [...]
Consider a situation where you have a type of resource which always
belongs to a resource of another type. How do you model the URI
space using Rails? For example, say you have an address
resource type. An address is always associated with exactly one user,
but a user may have several addresses (work, home, etc).
The simple [...]
We recently settled on using JSON as the preferred format for the
REST-based distributed application on which I am working. We don’t
need the expressiveness of XML and JSON is a lot cheaper to generate
and parse, particularly in Ruby. Now we are busy defining
dialects to encode the data we have, which is happy work. [...]
David Chappell declares the REST vs WS-* war over
To anybody who’s paying attention and who’s not a hopeless partisan,
the war between REST and WS-* is over. The war ended in a truce
rather than crushing victory for one side–it’s Korea, not World War
II. The now-obvious truth is that [...]
One of the least well understood core tenets of the REST architectural
style is that “hypermedia is the engine of application state”. Which
basically means that responses from the server will be documents that
include URIs to everything you can do next. For example, if GET a
blog post the response document will have URIs embedded in [...]
I have been watching the Semantic Web efforts with guarded
interest for the last few years. I really like the idea. However, I
have always thought it was probably a pipe dream. The Semantic Web is
a chicken and egg problem, there must be a lot of data published to
attract the general developer population but it needs to [...]
I recently setup an automated backup system for my (and my
wife’s) blog.1 Based on the
recommendation of Mr O’Grady (and my belief that
RESTful architectures are a good way to solve most problems) I decided
to use Amazon’s S3 as the off site storage. I did not to
take the same approach as RedMonk, however, because I wanted [...]
Charlie Savage and his team over at MapBuzz have decided that
is it time open the doors. MapBuzz is a great place to create and
share maps. If you like maps, and really who doesn’t, go give it a try.
Benjamin Carlyle has posted a followup about
using PUT to create new resources
in which he brings up some interesting issues.
First, it seems I miss understood his original idea slightly. My
misunderstanding does not affect how I feel about his approach much.
I don’t like the idea of PUT-ting to a “factory” resource with a GUID
in [...]
