Re: Checklist for 1.3

["Chris Travers" <..hidden..>]

Hi Ed;

I must admit I enjoyed reading this post.  We debated (in the IRC
channel) different web services architectures and protocols and also
settled on REST (instead of SOAP or XML/RPC).  We think that it is
both semantically and structurally elegant.  Jason's implementation is
a dispatcher for RESTful requests.  External applications could, of
course, use the RESTful XML interface as a data model.  Internally, of
course, we are working on an interface where the data model can be
almost entirely encapsulated in the database (opening this up to
add-on tools in whatever languages people want to use).

Aside from the fact that REST as an idea is beautifully elegant, it
has a number of practical benefits as well.

1)  Easy programming/development from any language.  Since the data is
separated from the RPC call (i.e. HTTP request type), there is less
room for problems between different development environments.

2)  One could add XSLT or CSS stylesheets for web browsers and allow
people to generate reports based directly on browsing the resources.
Such reports could be bookmarked.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers