[Twisted-web] Re: Thoughts on documentation, wading into Twisted,
Nevow, etc.
L. Daniel Burr
ldanielburr at mac.com
Tue Jul 11 18:21:33 CDT 2006
Hi Lloyd,
On Tue, 11 Jul 2006 17:35:05 -0500, <lloyd at paisite.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Valentino is better qualified to respond than I. But you've convinced
> me... provided that we have a really good definition of "Resource."
>
Fair enough, I think the Wikipedia definition is pretty good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_(Web)
> "Resource" is one of the concepts that baffled me last year. I couldn't
> get my head around what folks were talking about. Your phrase "The thing
> that a URL.points to..." definitely helps me see the bigger picture.
> Saying this, I realize that my own work has been moving away from the
> simple "set of linked pages" model. The Resource concept should give me
> better language to talk about what I've been doing.
>
Representational State Transfer (REST) is the concept that I most often
use when considering resources in a web application.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer#Resources
> Since naive folks like me are accustomed to thinking in terms of "pages,"
> it would probably be good to sharpen up and present your argument that
> many web apps today have more complex structures than "set of linked
> pages." We could explicitly point out that abstracting the notion of
> "page" to "Resource," opens the mind to more creative possiblies, then
> present a few examples of these possibilties. We should definitely
> include
> "page" as an an example of a "Resource," along with a few other examples.
>
Agreed.
I didn't really "get it" at first, because I had always though in terms
of "web pages". Once I read Fielding's paper and started thinking about
logical resources, rather than "every URL is a web page", everything just
fell into place, and I have a much easier time designing web applications
these days, even if I don't make them strictly in a REST-style.
> Want to try your hand at a crisp, evocative definition with examples?
>
Hopefully, we can just provide links to the two resources I cited, above.
That's sort of recursive, in a way, but there you have it.
> Many thanks,
Not at all, thanks to you and the others on the list who got the ball
rolling again.
L. Daniel Burr
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