On Feb 17, 2010, at 12:29 PM, Markus Karg wrote:
> Fielding's dissertation in the inner sense is talking about generic clients,
> like browsers, and it would be cool (and possible) to have one -- if I can
> surf the web with one browser, why should I have special clients for REST in
> common?
Because browsers are "human assisted" and the REST clients that we are interested in building (and are the focus of this discussion) are not.
This whole idea of a generic REST client that can solve all computing problems *without* human intervention is fascinating, unfortunately it is just that. I believe you're saying that rather than for every service there exist a client (for-all/exist), there exist a client that for every service (exist/for-all).
Clients need to make decisions to carry out tasks and these decisions tend to be service specific, especially those needed in enterprise tasks. Thus, the exist/for-all pattern just does not fly *unless* there is a human behind to make those decisions, because by definition the client cannot possibly know everything about every service out there (including those that haven't been invented).
-- Santiago