Anne Thomas Manes wrote:
> Perhaps -- but it's very difficult to meet the "hypermedia as the engine
> of state" constraint without using hyperlinks.
I believe it depends on what you believe hypermedia has to be, and what
information codifies a hyperlink. As I've said before, I believe that mobile
code and thus remote references to other objects that are in mobile code
"objects", is hypermedia. It allows the user of the mobile "object" to link to
the remote system.
In HTTP, we have URLs that represent the remote resource. In systems with
mobile code, such as RMI/Jini, we have the remote reference. I've tried to get
people to think differently about RMI than they tend to...
An RMI method invocation, such as that defined in an interface like
public interface MyInterface {
public Result someMethod( Type1 arg1, Type2 arg2 );
}
might be a programming langauge access to a post to URL
http://my.host.some.where.com/<arg1>?ff=<arg2>
In the RMI case, the application layer is the remoting, not the method call.
This is what many people can take a step towards. RMI, like HTTP, has some
simple semantics, and some powerful capabilities.
The value returned, of type Result, can certainly contain hyperlinks to
hypermedia.
Gregg Wonderly
