News and views from a software developer's perspective
Tuesday, April 30, 2002Just a thought: What with all the strife between Walter Hewlett and Carly Fiorina, do you think the merged company will be called Packard-Compaq? :-)
I mentioned in an earlier post to my weblog, that a good way to judge the results in the proposed settlement with Microsoft would be to look at its effect on the development of Samba. If Samba becomes more interoperable with Microsoft operating systems as a result Microsoft revealing the APIs and protocols used in their "middleware", then the settlement could be considered at least somewhat successful. If not, then clearly the settlement should be considered unsuccessful. Now we see the tricks from Microsoft that we could have easily anticipated. First, there are lots of conditions attached to the specs, that make the Samba project ineligible. The worst condition is that the GPL is prohibited. Second, as reported by the Samba team, the spec for CIFS released by Microsoft is away out of date. See the discussion on Slashdot.
After reading more about REST, I think I have a pretty good understanding of it now. And, I think I like the REST philosophy (or is it architecture?). When you think about it, REST is almost a natural extension of the current Web. Think about HTML screen-scraping, then think about making the screen-scraping unnecessary by having the server send cleaned-up XML instead of HTML. You could go further with REST, either in the direction of WebDAV, or in the direction of advanced HTTP use. As an example of the latter, clients and servers could take advantage of content negotiation in HTTP to deliver content in the form that the client can make the best use of. This feature of REST, of course, is a significant one, as it allows graceful upgrades to services.
Now, I'm thinking that REST would be a good architecture for an email message store. I hope to describe this idea on paper in more detail when I have the time.
Scott Johnson: Marketing Software When You Are a Small Company.
[Scripting News] Short, simple, good advice.