[Twisted-web] Re: Thoughts on documentation, wading into Twisted, Nevow, etc.

[L. Daniel Burr]

Hi Lloyd,

On Tue, 11 Jul 2006 17:35:05 -0500, <lloyd at paisite.com> wrote:

[snip]

> Valentino is better qualified to respond than I. But you've convinced
> me... provided that we have a really good definition of "Resource."
>

Fair enough, I think the Wikipedia definition is pretty good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_(Web)

> "Resource" is one of the concepts that baffled me last year. I couldn't
> get my head around what folks were talking about. Your phrase "The thing
> that a URL.points to..." definitely helps me see the bigger picture.
> Saying this, I realize that my own work has been moving away from the
> simple "set of linked pages" model. The Resource concept should give me
> better language to talk about what I've been doing.
>

Representational State Transfer (REST) is the concept that I most often
use when considering resources in a web application.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer#Resources

> Since naive folks like me are accustomed to thinking in terms of "pages,"
> it would probably be good to sharpen up and present your argument that
> many web apps today have more complex structures than "set of linked
> pages." We could explicitly point out that  abstracting the notion of
> "page" to "Resource," opens the mind to more creative possiblies, then
> present a few examples of these possibilties. We should definitely  
> include
> "page" as an an example of a "Resource," along with a few other examples.
>

Agreed.

I didn't really "get it" at first, because I had always though in terms
of "web pages".  Once I read Fielding's paper and started thinking about
logical resources, rather than "every URL is a web page", everything just
fell into place, and I have a much easier time designing web applications
these days, even if I don't make them strictly in a REST-style.

> Want to try your hand at a crisp, evocative definition with examples?
>

Hopefully, we can just provide links to the two resources I cited, above.
That's sort of recursive, in a way, but there you have it.

> Many thanks,

Not at all, thanks to you and the others on the list who got the ball
rolling again.

L. Daniel Burr