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Showing posts from March, 2009

HATEOAS in 3 lines

Stefan Tilkov brilliantly sums up the out-of-band information problem in REST's HATEOAS constraint on the REST-discuss group : Given the representation contains <link rel="some-concept" ref="/some-uri"> you don't hardcode the string "/some-uri" into your client, but rather the string "some-concept".

The misuse of the term "RESTful" in the Rails community

Today I went to a talk at the local Ruby on Rails group. The speaker was quite clueful. He had even implemented his own DSL to describe his business problem. Obviously, the guy was not a noobie in Ruby. However, what really turned me off was his usage of the word "RESTful". For him, it seemed to be a way to describe the inner workings of his application, like, say, "separation of concerns". RoR guys are generally not the most clueless people, but nobody in the audience challenged him about this. It seemed to be the generally accepted usage of the term in the Rails community. This made me think that DHH and Rails have done two things to REST: First, they greatly help to evangelize the term "RESTful" Second, they hijacked the meaning of the term and changed it from "architectural style" to "application architecture" As it happens I listened to a podcast from the Pragmatic Programmers on my way home. It was about the .Net Ruby implementati