Amazingly Close

While looking up some stuff in the book "Integration Patterns" I spotted a tiny sentence that is amazingly close to REST. In chapter one on page 3 the authors (among them Gregor Hohpe, BTW) emphasize that from the point of view of integration the whole must be considered instead of solely designing for each integration between two applications in turn. The sentence is

However, if you approach this same problem from an integration architecture perspective, the ideal application is a thin layer of presentation that consumes shared functionality or data at the enterprise level.

I find this amazingly close to the notion of a user agent component consuming representations and capabilities provided by resources.

Serendipitous Reuse vs. Reusable Services

The notion of reusable service builds on the anticipation of its uses

Reusable components notion focusses on using the same component for the same purpose often. There is no focus on use in unanticipated contexts. seren. reuse oth does that.

Serendipitous reuse on the other hand focusses on building components (that expose functionality) and using those compoents in unanticipated ways.

IRC Conversation on User, User Agent, Media Types, Application etc.

Currently I am trying to figure out the significance of the various aspects of a RESTful architecture with regard to modeling. Such aspects as user agent, media type, steady state, user, application, and application state. Tried to build-up an explanatory train of thought on that basis in an exchange with Philipp Meier on #rest IRC yesterday. It is the typical, hard to read, IRC conversation but you might find it useful nevertheless.