6 June 2008
REST is the assembly language of the web
Some recent REST-related traffic in the blogosphere (both pro- and anti-) has discussed the ‘challenge’ of there being only a handful of REST verbs. The discussions revolve around how to map those verbs and the resources they act upon to a wide range of application functions. So we have Stefan (Tilkov?) writing: “I force my application semantics to adhere to the common HTTP semantics …”
Ugh! This smells like assembly-language programming. Application code isn’t written with CPU instructions and registers in mind; compilers and runtimes were long ago designed to take care of that.
We are at a primitive point in the development of applications to run on this networked computer. We need automatic compilation of high-level languages into ‘REST Assembly Language’ so we can write distributed applications much nearer to their problem domains.
Talk about RISC! This distributed computer has a tiny instruction set but limitless locations into which limitless pieces of information are organised.
Writing good compilers will be very challenging, but if the REST vision is to be fulfilled, very worthwhile.
