Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff

How to GET a Cup of Coffee

In a new article, Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson show how to drive an application's flow through the use of hypermedia in a RESTful application, using the well-known example from Gregor Hohpe's Starbucks does not use Two-Phase-Commit" to illustrate how the Web's concepts can be used for integration purposes.

While many people have grasped the utility of REST for simple cases, the authors show how to get more value out of the REST core concepts, specifically the "hypermedia as the engine of application state" principle. They show how links, included within resource representations retrieved from the server, can enable the client to find out which possible transitions are available from a particular point in the overall application flow.

A really, really excellent article at InfoQ.

Comments

On October 2, 2008 10:18 PM, Bill de hÓra said:

Q205: “I feel that I have learned a lot from the discussions with the REST folks and together with Jim we hope to move that understanding forward to service-oriented computing with our upcoming MEST paper.” http://savas.parastatidis.name/2005/03/12/505b74f7-d5d3-4b94-95d4-65129ce2bf2b.aspx

Q205: “MEST - Embraces the SOAP processing model as its fundamental architectural constraint. The SOAP processing model is prevalent throughout the architecture of applications built using this style. SOAP messages flow from sender through intermediates to ultimate recipients which are applications. Applications deal with SOAP messages as a first-class constructs and are utterly agnostic about how messages are transported from semantic viewpoint.” http://jim.webber.name/2005/04/16/26e0bdcf-65de-4cce-9c0b-1f35bc43620e.aspx

Q308: “In fact, we’ll show how Web techniques can be used with all the dependability associated with traditional EAI tools, and how the Web is much more than XML messaging over a request/response protocol”

What happened to MEST and “processThis”? And why doesn’t the example use SOAP? I think if we’re going to be looking to experts for guidance, some rationale on an architectural shift would be good to see ;)

On October 2, 2008 10:23 PM, Stefan Tilkov Author Profile Page said:

Well … you live and learn :-)

On October 5, 2008 1:35 PM, Jim Webber said:

I was going to comment about Bill’s points here, but my piece got a little long, so instead see:

http://jim.webber.name/2008/10/05/fdfe86e2-3679-4540-b006-b9f10c02b3f8.aspx

Jim

On October 6, 2008 2:13 AM, Savas Parastatidis said:

Hi Bill,

In addition to Jim’s message, here are my thoughts too…

http://savas.parastatidis.name/2008/10/06/c2a55415-5ded-433f-8190-f45cffd0ba18.aspx

Thanks for bringing this up. It really made me to want to blog again :-) It’s fun! :-)

.savas.