REST solutions

I've tried with varying degrees of success to express a certain thesis; Aristotle Pagaltzis nails it on rest-discuss:

... Resources derive from the solution domain, not part of the problem domain. Creating resources for concepts that the solution requires is how modeling works in REST terms; they don’t have to derive from any aspect of the problem in order to be justified.

Vish gets it. The problem is that you've got a legacy database and network access to it (SOAP/W*S) sucks (no uniform interface, no caching, etc). The solution: create new web resources that interface easily and cleanly with client-side javascript. These resources don't have to map one-to-one to any particular object or method in your database or framework.

Interestingly, the quote occurs in a thread about "query resources", a notion I've blogged and which remains difficult to swallow for GIS folks.

Comments

Re: REST solutions

Author: Peter Rushforth

I like the idea of posted queries, in fact Atomojo allows posted XQuery and Sparql queries. I am curious about using posted XSLT as the content of an entry. Given the ability of XSLT to access other web resources, I'm wondering if a good pattern for an XSLT couldn't be developed which was RESTful. Cheers, Peter

Re: REST solutions

Author: Sean

I don't see why XSL couldn't be used as a representation of resources that act on other documents.