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In-Reply-To: http://www.treedragon.com/ged/map/ti/newApr02.htm#21apr02-scraping

Sjoerd Visscher wrote me to describe his recent scraping of my site. Below I reprint parts of his email, which I expect Sjoerd won't mind. (This is part of a drift in the direction of expecting public exchanges.) [...] If you don't mind, I could put a link to it here for other folks to use. [David McCusker]

I don't mind. Already 20 people are downloading the feed every day. There are probably plenty more people interested. The use of public weblogs instead of e-mail is interesting. But there's a lot to be done before it's really going to work. The biggest problem that prevents building cool tools is that there's no way to get the post that goes with a permalink.

Dave Winer about verbs and nouns

Dave comments about REST as a programming style. If there's something left of the AppleScript discussion online, I'd like to read it. I'm in the REST camp because I think it's less work. Reducing the number of verbs in the Manila-RPC interface, with the advancedPrefs API, was a big improvement IMHO.

REST as a programming style

I'm now convinced that one can architect a system in accordance to the principles of REST and then implement that system using RPC style, HTTP transport, POST binding, SOAP. [Sam Ruby]

This really opened my eyes to look for what REST is really about. If I understand it correctly a RESTful RPC system has a small API. What really happens depends on the parameters, ideally some kind of (global) id. In most cases the API is something like: read, create, change and delete in one form or another. Translated to programming terms it is like having a huge set of global variables (the state of the program) which are read and written directly. Sounds like REST violates a lot of rules of both functional and object oriented programming.

OPML with related pages

I wanted to try the new Google API. And reading that Dave Winer is having fun using his Google Outline Browser, I thought I'd try that too in my OPMLLoader. It's a bit different from Dave's version. You can expand any link to a page and see the related pages. Dave's right, it's really fun!

XML-RPC vs SOAP

Sam Ruby is waiting for the light-bulb to go off. I think it's like this: SOAP is about XML, and XML-RPC is about scripting. When I want to call a function on my PHP server with a Javascript client, I don't want to be bothered with XML. I want the arguments to be native data structures, and the same goes for the return values. Both serverside and clientside. But when you're in a situation where you're already using XML and schemas etc., then SOAP is more powerful. Apis like Google's are used in both cases, so supporting both SOAP and XML-RPC would have been my choice.

Some small things to break the silence

• I'm scraping David McCusker's weblog and Eric Costello's weblog.
• For OPML fans running Mozilla:
  1. Bookmark this link:http://w3future.com/html/opmlloader.html#%s.
  2. Add the keyword "opml" to the properties of that bookmark.
  3. Type "opml http://radio.weblogs.com/0001015/instantOutliner/daveWiner.opml" in the addressbar.