Comments on: Interoperability Wars – Episode 6 – Part 1 – Revenge of Babble

By: Divide and Conquer » Blog Archive » RESTafari

Divide and Conquer » Blog Archive » RESTafari — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:02:06 +0000

[...] Interoperability Wars – Episode 6 – Part 1 – Revenge of Babble just made me want to create a blog post with that [...]

By: Roger

Roger — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 20:04:10 +0000

I’m just starting to get immersed in this stuff, but it seems like there’s a slippery slope one gets on that starts with “I’m going to publish little blog-like entries” that turns to “I’m going to add some simple custom metadata to my entries” to “I’m going to add lots of potentially complex custom metadata to my entries” and ends up as “my entries are pretty much all data”.

At the bottom of this slope the Atom baggage seems pretty heavy, but my current theory is that the benefits of generic content management outweigh the benefits of a lightweight and tidy schema for the data-only stuff.

Compared to the issues with XHTML+RDF or the ambiguities and adhockery of microformats, the GDATA approach doesn’t seem that nasty to me. But hey, I’m just a tourist here so far. :-)

By: Administrator

Administrator — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 22:46:40 +0000

Tobu, the examples in that link use Picasa. Using ATOM to point at lists of things (like Photos) makes a lot of sense. Although I think Google’s use of ATOM in GDATA is really nasty (e.g. shoving data into entry headers instead of into content, etc.).

I think Opensocial is a better example of the problem. There they use GDATA to contain social information. They aren’t pointing at anything. Rather they are collecting together what could be really trivial XML structures that have been bloated all out of recognition by shoe horning them into Feeds and Entries. This is exactly the sort of thing Babble thrives on. Needless complexity.

By: Tobu

Tobu — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 17:21:24 +0000

While the embrace-extend scenario is entertaining (and worrying!), examples of GData with curl look nothing like Babble's dark form. Reality check?

By: Administrator

Administrator — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:16:36 +0000

Dan, I don’t think you missed anything at all. The question comes down to – is all the extra complexity and overhead of ATOM a price worth paying to model data directly? Does ATOM add any real value in those cases? Sure, you can use APP to update entries if you use ATOM to wrap them, but so what? What does APP provide in those cases over a PUT or POST directly on the data itself?

BTW, isn’t OpenSearch essentially a competitor to ATOM in that it has a format that clearly could be expressed in ATOM? It seems to me that OpenSearch should just be an extension of ATOM. Also, I thought it is only intended for reading content, not writing it.

By: Dan Diephouse

Dan Diephouse — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 03:45:49 +0000

Maybe I missed this – but why wouldn’t it be modeled such that each user is content in an entry which can be modified via the APP? Then the collection would be all the users and you can add search via OpenSearch.

By: Danny

Danny — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 21:12:57 +0000

Yaron, cool!

By: Sylvain Hellegouarch

Sylvain Hellegouarch — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 03:13:15 +0000

Alright, that makes much more sens to me now. I really had missed you were trying to warn about abuse to the protocol and how it doesn’t fit every scenarios.

You are definitely right, there will be many instances where AtomPub is just the wrong technology to chose. However, if the mismatch is low enough, I believe it can still be a good idea to use Atom.

But it’s quite likely that we see appearing extension that show a design problem somewhere but we can’t help that. AtomPub and Atom are great but there is also much hype around them that some so-called IT agencies will try to push forward as the new swiss army knife. A bit likely like SOAP.

By: Administrator

Administrator — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 01:29:14 +0000

Sylvain, this isn’t about my scenarios. I’m not using APP for those. This is about other people who have scenarios I feel are very similar to mine but who are choosing to use APP anyway. I believe they are making a mistake and I’m trying to determine if there is community consensus that using APP for these types of scenarios is an anti-pattern.

I would note, for example, that your comment is one of the only ones that just flat out said that this isn’t a good way to use APP. Most of the responses that addressed the scenario tried to find ways to recast the situation so it would be appropriate for APP.

APP isn’t perfect for everything and it would be good if we could get some consensus on what not to do with APP.

By: Hugh Winkler

Hugh Winkler — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 22:32:52 +0000

A year and a half ago I made a tongue in cheek post about MS’s doing the same thing to atom:

http://hughw.blogspot.com/2006/04/slightly-more-complex-list-extensions.html