Anne, I can see the elegance of some designs using REST (e.g. APP), but I'm a bit confused by the insistence that the only semantics on offer are GET, PUT, POST, DELETE.
Yesterday, I visited "www.amazon.co.uk" with my browser, performed a couple of GET operations, a POST operation and another GET. Imagine my surprise when this morning a book was delivered to me and I discovered that my credit card had been charged £12.45. How did this happen? I only performed GET and POST, both well- defined operations. Why was my credit card charged and why did I receive a book in the post? Later on, I pointed the browser at one of the account pages offered by my ISP and performed exactly the same series of operations: GET, GET, POST and GET. My sister later rang to say she had received an email from me at around the same time. How did this happen? I performed the same sequence of GET and POST operations and expected to receive a book (like a monkey, I learn pretty quickly :-). Why did this time an email get sent instead? So it seems that in REST, if I perform the same operations, it seems the "real world effect" might be different in every case. That doesn't sound very uniform to me. Where do the additional semantics come from? Thanks, -Mike Glendinning. --- In [email protected], "Anne Thomas Manes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Gregg, > > "invoke" is not a uniform interface because it doesn't work unless you also > supply a method name to invoke. And in RMI, the method names are not > uniform. They are getXXX and setXXX for each of the public attributes in the > object, plus any other operations that the developer chooses to expose. > > In REST, you also have the equivalent of "invoke", but the methods that you > can invoke are always uniform. In the case of HTTP, they are GET, PUT, POST, > DELETE. > > Anne >
