It was a mildly historic day; a few of us got together on IRC and tried to
interoperate some early
Atom
Publishing Protocol implementations. The only server on the air
was from
Dave Johnson. We got two
different clients to talk to it; one was a Big Secret Project from a Big Famous
Company based on all sorts of slick infrastructure. Mine was
curl. I managed to introspect the server, list the entries,
create a new entry, update it, and delete it. I screwed up the messaging a
few times, and Dave’s server only blew chunks about half of them.
Those who know what curl is are probably snickering now.
But I think the fact that you can debug a nontrivial application with
curl -X -i -d -H is a significant weapon in
the quiver of RESTafarians. Let’s see ya do that with your SOAP + WSDL +
WS-Policy + WS-Addressing + WS-MetadataExchange + WS-ReliableMessaging app.
Actually, the big take-away isn’t that, it’s that the Atom
protocol is simple and easy to implement and robust. The world needs
something like this. Later: Hey,
more Atom
Protocol stuff from Joe Gregorio over at XML.com.
