This content has moved permanently to:
https://blog.jonm.dev/posts/rest-unix-programming-for-the-web/
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
The Art of Writing Software
All articles Copyright © 2007-2019 by Jon Moore. All rights reserved.
7 comments:
"Everything is a RESTful service" - close but not quite right. "Everything is a RESTful resource" is more correct. Verbs such as HEAD, GET, PUT, POST, DELETE can then be applied to these resources. Just a minor quibble, interesting entry ;-)
FYI:
O'Reilly.net: Pipes and Filters for the Internet.
O'Reilly and Jon Udell have written numerous pieces on the subject matter going back to 1996.
BTW - check out Yahoo! Pipes. It's amazing.
-Karl
Thanks, Karl, the Yahoo! Pipes are pretty cool. I think I'm looking for something a little lower-level here, though that involves more than just XML translations on GETs.
I'm thinking of "command lines" like:
GET http://host:port/path | xslt transform.xslt | POST http://otherhost/path2
Actually, holy crap, now that I wrote that, I think that's the basics of a "REST shell". In fact, I bet you could write a compiler for it...
Jon, I had not considered visualizing resource modeling and composite web services/applications with something equally elegant like UNIX file abstractions and orchestration of simple filters. I will have to adopt that. What I have found most helpful, as you suggest, is a calculus. See Actor Model and check out Ahga's dissertation.
Ironically, it was in WS-* land and efforts in process execution engines (WS-BPEL) where pi-calculus is a necessity, that I developed my understanding of how a calculus for RESTful web resources may work (at least for me). This whiteboard picture of Actor Model for REST is what I keep in mind. The biggest take away from this is how natural parallelism shines through (as the value) of REST architecture in web resources. People claim that REST architecture is more scalable and Google demonstrates this with GData but perhaps a calculus proves this.
Actor Model Theory and Web Resources
wget http://host:port/path | xsltproc
transform.xslt | wget --post-data=string http://otherhost/path2
for:
GET http://host:port/path | xslt transform.xslt | POST http://linux.die.net/man/1/xsltproc
http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/
http://linux.die.net/man/1/xsltproc
the tools already exist. the command line already exists :)
One of the beauties of the Web and Unix. As soon as you start desigining with REST in mind, these things start to become leverageable in a real way.
Here goes a good article on the subject:
http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/1644
Note that command line I shared above isn't tested and sure isn't going to run, but walk by Mat's desk and I bet he could wip it out in 5 minutes or less :)
- Karl
As for the academic side of things, I'm not aware of anything that's been done with respect to RESTful resources (but I haven't looked very hard either). It looks like a really nice problem domain for a bit of formalization and some theory...
--Steve
Check out NetKernel, a resource-oriented microkernel environment that has been under development for years. Dual-license. Very inline with what you are thinking about: http://netkernel.org
Post a Comment