On 6/14/07, Steve Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > But FWIW, IME, RESTful systems generally "look like and operate like" > > the business. That's not (or at least shouldn't be) a goal though, > > just an interesting side effect. > > Ummm could you show me one? So far the ones I've seen look like a set > of URIs and XML documents. Something concrete like warehouse stock > management or risk analysis would be good examples to have.
Have you used salesforce.com? You get URIs for important CRM resources like accounts, leads, contacts, etc.. And if you're looking at, say, a contact, it would include a link to the account that the contact is associated with, etc... I would definitely call having a name for those kinds of important resources "looking like" the business. The "operates like" bit is less clear with salesforce.com AFAICT: I haven't seen any workflow-like functionality, but I've yet to run across a workflow that couldn't be represented with hypermedia & form submission. I haven't looked at the salesforce "APIs", but I would hope that they also use URIs to provide the machine processable representations of those important resources (hopefully using the same URIs above, but I doubt they've done that). Mark.
