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 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.

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.