REST on IT Matters from Thoughtworks

Posted by Luke Bayes Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:44:00 GMT

I recently discovered a great podcast that is put out by Thoughtworks. I can’t remember at the moment who turned me on to this thing (probably Ali), but it really is fantastic.

http://www.thoughtworks.com/what-we-say/podcasts.html

Podcast #4 “REST – Representation State Transfer” is well worth a listen. Especially for those of us that build SWFs and even more so for those of you that push for binary data protocols.

In a bit of a meta joke, there doesn’t seem to be a link directly to the REST entry, so as this post gets older, the link above will become less meaningful!

I’m sure much of this is old news to many of you, but some key points that I took away were:

• The web is (or should be) about interoperable information
• Emergent behavior can illuminate business value in unexpected ways and places
• We should search for ways to allow the consumer to determine how they interact with their data, regardless of its source
• When we transmit data from one layer or system to another, text is king
• While the promise of an interoperable web is still a long way off with any technology, it is truly broken by “Blob formats” (like SWF and Silverlight).

With HTML, the user interface is simply another layer of data. Thanks to the nature of text, this layer can be inspected and (sometimes) understood by both humans and computers.

By distributing our interface as a binary file, we’re essentially hiding our second layer of (even more valuable) application data from the wider web and unexpected consumption.

I’m not just talking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is broken by SWF – regardless of what people claim – I’m talking about wider discoverability and reuse. SWF applications are black boxes.

I’m not trying to take away from the real value of some SWF tools. The technology can be extremely important, especially with tools like Buzzword, Phoenix, Ribbit and obviously YouTube.

I’m just acknowledging (possibly 10 years too late?), that while this web thing can (and should) be about rich, interactive experiences, the real power is in the data, the information.

While few of the problems we actually face can be distilled so deeply, I think Muxtape exemplifies this kind of beauty. The interfaces – both human and computer – have obviously been given some real consideration and while I could be wrong, I assume they use SWF for MP3 playback! It seems to me like it would be extremely simple for these developers to add a RESTful API to this service (if they haven’t already), and that’s where these kinds of services start to get unbelievably important and valuable!