Tag Archives: architecture

My biggest problem with Wikipedia

Posted on June 22, 2007 by David Megginson

Summary: You can’t partition a web site’s users into discrete groups by language. I don’t worry much about Wikipedia’s objectivity or reliability — no sources (especially not newspapers or Britannica) are objective or reliable, and at least Wikipedia preserves its … Continue reading →

Tagged architecture, tips, web | Comments Off

REST, the Lost Update Problem, and the Sneakernet Test

Posted on June 9, 2007 by David Megginson

Dare Obasanjo is giving a bit of pushback on the Atom Publishing Protocol, but the part that caught my attention was the section on the Lost Update Problem. This doesn’t have to do with REST per se as much as … Continue reading →

Tagged architecture, tips, web | 11 Comments

Open Data matters more than Open Source

Posted on March 28, 2007 by David Megginson

Dare Obasanjo just put up a posting with the title Open Source is Dead. Dare does happen to be a Microsoft employee, but his posting is none of the standard anti-Linux/OpenOffice/Apache/Firefox FUD. Instead, he voices a question that’s been floating … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged architecture, business, kulcher, rights, web | 5 Comments

REST: the quick pitch

Posted on February 15, 2007 by David Megginson

Now that the Java world is noticing REST, the low-pain alternative to RPC standards like WS-*, people are starting to blog about it again. Gossip with other IT folks also tells me that people’s customers are actually asking for REST … Continue reading →

Posted in REST | Tagged architecture, tips, web | 19 Comments

Beginning of the end for open web data APIs?

Posted on December 18, 2006 by David Megginson

[Update: hacking the Google Search AJAX API — see below.] [Update #2: Don Box is thinking along the same lines as I am.] [Update #3: Rob Sayre points out that there is, in fact, a published browser-side JavaScript API underlying … Continue reading →

Tagged architecture, business, news, web | 28 Comments

Firefox vs. PRG

Posted on May 31, 2006 by David Megginson

[Update: it’s working now, after upgrading Ubuntu. Here’s an online test for your own browser.] Post/Redirect/Get (PRG) is a common web-application design pattern, where a server responds to an HTTP POST request not by generating HTML immediately, but by redirecting … Continue reading →

Tagged architecture, web | 10 Comments

Continuations, cont'd

Posted on May 20, 2006 by David Megginson

[Update: see further contributions to the discussion from Ian Griffiths, Avi Bryant, James Robertson, and Joe Duffy; note also John Cowan’s excellent comment below, pointing out that hidden fields work with the back button but not with bookmarks.] It looks … Continue reading →

Tagged architecture, programming, web | 11 Comments

Tired of frameworks

Posted on April 23, 2006 by David Megginson

I’m tired of software-development frameworks — they seem always to be optimized for the way someone else works, or for the way someone else thinks I should work. Granted, it’s fun to write frameworks, and it’s almost as much fun … Continue reading →

Tagged architecture, programming | 5 Comments

The REST schism and the REST contradiction

Posted on March 25, 2006 by David Megginson

Update: a proposal for a better name. Don Box got people talking last week in a posting where he distinguishes between two kinds of REST: lo-REST, which uses only HTTP GET and POST, and hi-REST, which also uses HTTP PUT … Continue reading →

Tagged architecture, programming | 4 Comments