Comments on: REST is like Quantum Mechanics

By: Elliotte Rusty Harold

Elliotte Rusty Harold — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 13:36:43 +0000

Forms cannot emulate PUT because you have to POST to a different URL than the one you’re creating.

By: EgoH

EgoH — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 20:42:04 +0000

The PUT request isn’t really a problem, since updating a object requires a form.
Putting :method => :put in the options parameter of the form generator will make a hidden field which emulates the PUT behaviour. Since deleting is usually with links, this is a problem, since i don’t think it’s possible with a link.

By: Jerome Louvel

Jerome Louvel — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 10:40:26 +0000

Hi Elliotte,

I’ve discovered this post a bit late but I think that our Restlet project nicely supports your requirements. I’ve entered a RFE to support pluggable authentication mechanisms in our reference implementation, but the Restlet API itself is allowing several schemes (BASIC and Amazon for now).

The project has just reached 1.0 RC1:
http://www.restlet.org

I would be interested to hear your comments.

Best regards,
Jerome

By: links for 2006-05-15 at protocol7

links for 2006-05-15 at protocol7 — Mon, 15 May 2006 12:17:58 +0000

[...] REST is like Quantum Mechanics (tags: REST HTTP design to_read elliotte_rusty_harold) [...]

By: Roger L. Costello

Roger L. Costello — Fri, 05 May 2006 16:20:37 +0000

Hey Elliotte,

I wrote the below short article this morning, and then a colleague pointed out your article. Interesting how we are thinking along much the same lines. /Roger

Recall your school days when you learned that atoms, electrons, photons can exhibit both wave behavior as well as particle behavior.

Analogously â€¦.

Consider CNN: it serves up news stories in a variety of formats â€“ as HTML, audio, video, RSS. Thus, news story information is an abstract thing that can take on many different formats.

Quantum particles exhibit a wave-particle duality. Information exhibits a HTML-XML-MP3-MPEG-JPEG-â€¦ plurality.

Physicists canâ€™t really explain quantum particles; they can only tell you how they will behave. Similarly, we canâ€™t really say what information is; we can only give it various representations (HTML, XML, MP3, â€¦)

By: Elliotte Rusty Harold

Elliotte Rusty Harold — Fri, 05 May 2006 01:43:52 +0000

Browsers aren’t required for REST. HTML forms don’t support PUT or DELETE, but those aren’t the right verbs for most of the things HTML forms are used for anyway. XForms will support DELETE, though not until the next version. Some web editors such as Netscape Composer do support PUT. They just don’t support it through an HTML form.

By: Bag O’ Tricks » Blog Archive » REST Query Language

Bag O’ Tricks » Blog Archive » REST Query Language — Tue, 02 May 2006 05:40:05 +0000

[...] On the real web, data isn’t just about documents. It isn’t just about indivisible resources. We might like to think there are just atoms, but there really are subatomic particles, and ERH, GData, the HTTP spec, and everyone else admits as much. Look for the word query, and you’ll find it’s no secret. [...]

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 01 May 2006 17:22:05 +0000

Unless I’m mistaken, common web browsers require JavaScript for REST. That is, I haven’t had success with form actions other that GET and POST. Or in other words, I haven’t been able to do PUT or DELETE without XMLHttpRequest.

Anyone else with other experience?

By: Adam Rosien

Adam Rosien — Mon, 01 May 2006 17:17:50 +0000

I believe there is a spin-out of HP that created a framework that mapped URLs to “anything”, i.e., Java methods, files, etc. Sorry I can’t remember the name. But it tackled many of the resource issues you describe.

By: Al Lang

Al Lang — Mon, 01 May 2006 12:58:37 +0000

“As soon as you try to figure out what the wave function actually represents, well then you fall down a sink hole of bad physics and worse philosophy.”

Actually, that whole statement is just the sort of bad philosophy universally adopted by physicists who think philosophy doesn’t matter.