I know some of you don't like Dave, but I just had to say "wha?!" at reading his anti-REST rant on Scripting News.
I used to think REST was academic bullshit until I read Paul Kulchenko's great explanation of it when I was editing "Programming Web Services with Perl". Now I think of it as just a consistent orthogonal way of thinking about your data and your services so that you're taking maximum advantage of HTTP and URLs.
Nowhere do I get Winer's "REST was a retrofit by people who don't like personal computers to try to stop progress in building GUI software that ran over the Internet" comment. What does REST have to do with GUIs? Personal computers? It reads like a totally off the handle wig-out.
Reading Dave is always interesting. Sometimes I learn (a lot of my thoughts on the economics of open source and small commercial software development were triggered by Dave's thoughts in Scripting News) but sometimes I feel like I'm looking at a sloppy knee-high pile of elephant shit trying to figure out what the elephant ate that made it sick. I just had to share this steaming pile of anti-REST poop with you.
--Nat
Dave is the greatest source of wasted thought cycles in the computer industry. He is an endless font of content-free wisdom.I know some of you don't like Dave, but I just had to say "wha?!" at reading his anti-REST rant on Scripting News.
The quote you referred to reads like a reporter was seeking out a well known negative-minded media darling to grab an inflammatory anti-REST quote for some story on web services. I wouldn't waste too much time thinking about it.
