Perl/CPAN v. Ruby ?

[Robin Berjon]

On Mar 09, 2006, at 15:48, Jonathan Peterson wrote:
> Are people really using REST with HTTP PUT, and DELETE methods?

Yes, we used it here and I thought we were doing something unusual  
(albeit bloody obvious) but almost every time I mention it it seems  
someone will say "oh yeah, we do that too, work real nice". I take  
this to be happy news. Also, at the Web APIs meeting two weeks ago,  
while we were talking about what minimal set of features from  
XMLHttpRequest needed to be standardised, I thought people would push  
to only require GET and POST but was pleasantly surprised to see  
everyone around the room adamantly push in violent agreement for  
HEAD, PUT, and DELETE (at least) with REST being mentioned quite a  
few times as the reason.

I guess the good thing about becoming old and cynical is you get more  
happy surprises.

> We tried to use XMLRPC, which is easier and faster than SOAP, but it
> doesn't appear to have been well adopted at large, and we are  
> increasingly
> finding everyone wants SOAP APIs. But SOAP is a PITA and always  
> seems to
> be slow. bleh.

IME people don't want SOAP APIs, they want APIs that hide away all  
this scary XML and HTTP stuff. I've found that wrapping all that in  
shiny looking interfaces that make it look like they're just calling  
a local library makes them happy. YMMV.

-- 
Robin Berjon
    Senior Research Scientist
    Expway, http://expway.com/