QCon talk by Peter Rodgers about REST
Posted Sun, 16 Mar 2008 15:44:00 GMT
Actually, not just about REST. Those guys spent some time analysing the structure and workings of the web, and asked themselves why it was so efficient and malleable. While most other software was brittle, messy, and unreliable. They found some basic truths about the web, such as, the cost of change is much lower than the added value of that change, therefore it’s worth changing the system.
Anyway, they figured that it’s the “uniform well-observed address space”, which allows the latest bleeding edge Firefox three to connect to some apache server which may have been running for twenty years. It is also the thing that allows resources to be cached in a way that is self-optimising, much like a system acting under the laws ofthermodynamics (the guy’s from a physics background). Incidentally, it is also the main premise behind REST. So apparently, they’ve figured a way to build systems that have similar properties. Their thing is here - http://www.1060research.com/. It’s very impressive in purely philosophical terms and in the implications it has for software developments as a whole.
I reckon some of these concepts can be applied in practice without actually buying their product, NetKernel…
By the way more on this can be found in Roy Fielding’s dissertation here - http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/restarchstyle.htm
