[Baypiggies] Do you think this would be cool open source? / web service discovery

[Shannon -jj Behrens]

On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 9:50 PM, Drew Perttula <drewp at bigasterisk.com> wrote:
> Shannon -jj Behrens wrote:
>>
>> WADL will be really cool when every Web service starts providing the
>> WADL file themselves.
>
> That's true, but you don't have to wait for *every* web service nor do they
> have to write their *own* WADL descriptions. If someone translated the
> flickr API docs to WADL, that would be immediately useful. Or so I would
> assume, but I'm happy with the current state
>
>>
>> Drew, you've coded in XML-RPC.  Wasn't that so much easier than REST?
>> I think that part of the reason it's easier is because more of the API
>> handling gruntwork can be done automatically.
>
> It's about the same, except I don't have several GUI and console browsers
> available for testing xmlrpc. And when the request or response is a big
> binary file, the REST support is better.
>
> I'm using py-restclient, so my calls look like this:
>
> # finally some python on the baypiggies list!
> addressBook = restclient.Resource("http://addressbook.com")
> addressBook.get("search", first="Drew", phone="12345")
> addressBook.post("photo/drewp", open("me.jpg").read(),
>                 {'Content-Type' : 'image/jpeg'})
>
> Most of the systems I talk to can return JSON, so my response handling in
> python is usually just a jsonlib.loads() call. I get roughly the same type
> support XMLRPC offers. The services that can only return XML need an
> ElementTree.fromString call, which is certainly more complicated, but not
> terrible.
>
> Now that I think more about it, my development environment is a _lot_ better
> when I'm working with REST than with XMLRPC (again, given the systems I'm
> playing with these days). I test with curl and firebug as well as ipython;
> the REST services I create have doc pages with live html form demos in them;
> huge documents can be streamed; I can insert http caches; low-level
> debugging by sniffing the traffic is reasonable; etc.
>
>
>
>
> That reminds me: I learned from this interesting presentation
> (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/mnot-http-status-1108) that squid cache
> has a cool mode where it can return stale data while it fetches new data.
> See here for a diagram and better description:
>
>  http://www.mnot.net/blog/2007/12/12/stale
>
> That's the kind of thing I never get around to adding to my various
> hand-made caches, yet it seems really useful for high-performance cases.

Well argued, Drew.

-jj

-- 
In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things
with great love. -- Mother Teresa
http://jjinux.blogspot.com/