posted Sunday, January 19, 2003 at 2:12 pm MSTReading a piece by Tim Appnel [hereafter tima] "RESTful API wanted. Apply within" from 13DEC02 got me thinking I should spend more time on this topic, especially reading "It seems if ever there was a tool/medium that needed a RESTful API it's weblogging." (With thanks to tima, I've screen-scrapped / plagiarized his item for the following material. Please read his full version, his item from today ("Cohesion. TrackBack. More"), and "A RESTful Publishing API" / 25NOV02 as well.)
Ben Trott summarizes the issues and writes "in the case of Movable Type, "... our interest in this matter is in hoping that tools originally built for the Blogger API can be also used for MT-powered blogs without the loss in functionality that currently exists" and, in a later post, comments further with notice of the Blogger 2 API effort.
Elsewhere Sam Ruby says "Sigh. It looks like the future of blogging clients and servers is to have more code in if/switch/case statements and configuration options than actual logic. [...] the only real guarantee you will have is that vendor A's clients will work with vendor A's servers." Sam later comments on ''vendor lock-in''.Joe Gregorio has opened The Well-Formed Web and is developing a prototype with such an API. Joe explains the RESTful approach in context of Ben Trott's concerns.
tima writes: "Rather then debate amongst ourselves, Joe and I opened a mailing list ... Some examples of existing initiatives ... RESTLog, Extremely Simple Syndication (XSS) format and TrackBack. All are welcome and encouraged to join the discussion."
I'll leave off here with two last rounds from hiss blog: A Birthday Web Service from Jon Udell and Web Services We'd Like To See.
