I need some REST (sorry, it's really a terrible pun)

apenwarr mentioned components recently (among other things). Just wanted to mention that, as a designer of a component system like COM, yeah, Unix pipelines are indeed a component system, and the only truly successful one, at that!

COM also did okay as part of ActiveX and its OCX predecessor, the Visual Basic components being the only one that succeeded as a market, which isn't bad, as that was supposed to be the whole point. But it never came down to the people the way Unix pipelines did (for some value of "people").

While I agree with most of the rest of his post, I think he got REST slightly wrong. REST isn't easier to index than SOAP, and would need similar plug-ins to do so. A REST protocol could be designed to provide this consistent reliability, not mangling data. But REST is just a "style" of web services, comparable more to things like "message-passing" or "remote procedure calls". It sort of makes his point correct anyway, since there's no "REST protocol" to "beat" the SOAP and the WS-* ones.

Syndicated 2006-12-06 20:49:10 (Updated 2006-12-06 20:53:25) from Pierre Phaneuf