daihozen

The term ROA (Resource-Oriented Architecture) is misleading. It should ideally stand for "Resource/Representation-Oriented Architecture", even though that's quite a mouthful. I've found in my discussions with people who work on REST-based systems that lots of them are very fuzzy about the notions of "resource" and "representation", even though these are the fundamental concepts underlying REST (and my forthcoming messaging-oriented variant, ROMA). Let me try and explain this. Let's say I found a space capsule that had fallen out of the sky, and by deciphering the alien glyphs on its surface, I understood that it contained a 4-dimensional object from the planet Royf. Unfortunately, I couldn't take the object out, because ours is a 3-dimensional world and such an operation is impossible. However, I found that it was possible to get the capsule to "project" a 3-dimensional image of the object it contained, so I could "see" ...

It seems the season for me to post comments in response to provocative topics on LinkedIn.  A few days ago, Pradeep Bhat posed the question, "What Are The Drawbacks Of REST?" on the REST Architects LinkedIn Group. As before, I had an opinion on this too, which I reproduce below: "I wouldn't say REST has "drawbacks" as such. It does what it says on the tin, and does that very well. But remember that the only implementation of the REST architecture uses the HTTP protocol. We can surely think of a future RESTian implementation that uses another transport protocol, and that is where some improvements could be made.  1. HTTP is a synchronous, request/response protocol. This means the protocol does not inherently support server-initiated notifications (peer-to-peer), which are often required. That's why callbacks in RESTian applications require the use of application-level design patterns like Webhooks. Now that we have a bidirectional transport protocol in t...