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Maybe the simpler explanation is that HTTP/WWW was always broken. It's never been a great application platform. It's popular and universal and simple (sortof),

Maybe the simpler explanation is that HTTP/WWW was always broken. It's never been a great application platform. It's popular and universal and simple (sortof), so that's awesome, but in terms of great tech it's kind of been junk all along. It's not like it ever was universally conformed to. It's not like there was this golden era. What would be the golden era? The web before AJAX? Geocities and Hotmail? Frames broke URLS more than almost anything. PHPNuke forums? Web apps sucked back in the early days. Makes me think of a fun Alan Kay quote: > The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. -- Alan Kay.

woah 12y ago
Yea, the specification of status codes is cumbersome and annoying to deal with, like you're supposed to go find a list of what they are supposed to be on wikipedia and then match it up to what's going in your application as best you can. Also the PUT, POST etc stuff. It's just a pain to try to match up your application's behavior to a crusty old spec that was never that good. It's really refreshing to code with websockets and just write an application naturally. HTTP is good for GETing static web pages and that's about it.
- TylerE 12y ago
  Way to oversimplify. HTTP works ok for some super dumb use cases. But pray tell, what's the proper way to update multiple objects at once? Simple verbs work for simple tasks - only. There is more to life than REST.
  - jdmichal 12y ago
    Updating multiple resources of the same type is easy: POST to the plural form of the resource. If you need to update multiple resources of different types atomically, then you probably need a new resource abstraction that covers both of the resources anyway. Then just POST to that.

woah 12y ago

Yea, the specification of status codes is cumbersome and annoying to deal with, like you're supposed to go find a list of what they are supposed to be on wikipedia and then match it up to what's going in your application as best you can. Also the PUT, POST etc stuff. It's just a pain to try to match up your application's behavior to a crusty old spec that was never that good. It's really refreshing to code with websockets and just write an application naturally. HTTP is good for GETing static web pages and that's about it.

TylerE 12y ago
Way to oversimplify. HTTP works ok for some super dumb use cases. But pray tell, what's the proper way to update multiple objects at once? Simple verbs work for simple tasks - only. There is more to life than REST.
- jdmichal 12y ago
  Updating multiple resources of the same type is easy: POST to the plural form of the resource. If you need to update multiple resources of different types atomically, then you probably need a new resource abstraction that covers both of the resources anyway. Then just POST to that.