Sal received his MBA from Harvard Business School. He also holds a Masters in electrical engineering and computer science, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and a BS in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
...but I don't think that he's too poor to buy one. everyone has its own methods to work ;) he surely would draw better images, but I personally think that the quality of the lectures would remain on the same high level :)
I have to admit that I haven't experimented a lot with REST, so maybe some REST-experts here on HN will help me out answering some of these questions or give feedback regarding the answers that will follow in the next paragraphs :)
regarding question 1:
I think it's all a question of how your method behaves -- or how it is implemented. if your method requires JSON, then you'll have to feed it JSON. if your method requires 2 parameters, then you'll have to give it 2 parameters (e.g. myservice.com/?param1=123¶m2=456).
regarding question 2:
no, it's definitely not a problem, until the library is not maintained anymore or god knows what else. well, yes, it's more intuitive to write a plain simple function then to construct a very complicated request string as you mentioned.
as I already stated above, I don't have enough experience with REST at the moment to give you a more precise response, so I hope this one suffices. I also hope that somebody here on HN with more experience in the REST field will answer your question more precisely, so I can learn a thing or two, too :)
With a REST implementation you roll yourself, you'd just have to re-implement this stuff, wouldn't you? Or what am I missing?
No, you wouldn't. as generalk sayed in his comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1053384), it's the reverse, namely with REST over HTTP you'll make use of HTTP, which perfectly provides the functions to accomplish the task of invoking a method remotely without having to implement this important part on your own. I'll try to make an example.
let's pretend you have a method called GetEmployeeByName(string name).
with REST you'll implement this method and allow your users to invoke it via http://myservice.com/employee/simpson. the invocation, parameter-passing, error-handling etc. is done via HTTP, so theoretically no work is needed on this part, since you don't have to implement HTTP.
with XML-RPC the thing is pretty different. you'll implement the method, but what you have to do now is -- as described in the article -- find a library (or implement your own) that will generate all the needed XML files etc.
you see, with REST over HTTP you just skip the XML-generating-and-some-more-task and let HTTP do the work. why reinvent the wheel when HTTP is suited pretty well for this part of the task?
I think the leaderboard is a very good reward for the people who spend quite a lot of time on submitting quality links and contributing to discussions with good comments. every upvote on Hacker News (especially in the comments section) is hard-earned IMHO. the community upvotes quality, and that's one of the main reasons why I love to read links from Hacker News and take part on discussions here. for me it's really rewarding when I see that one of my comments / submissions got an upvote (note: I'm no karma-wh__e by any means!)
yes, that definitely works only if you have 1 coder. fellow students of mine used email for SCM while working on a school project. it was pretty funny to hear that, since a) the major was Computer Science and b) the university would have set up SVN repositories on request (on university servers). well, after we told them about SVN and various other SCMT, they stopped pretty fast to use email for such an important task.
very good point! we have a mathematician in our engineering team. one of our teachers (software engineer) was working toward his PhD in nuclear physics, but stopped in the tick of it because he wanted to work in the IT. you really just should do what you think is right for you. if you wake up in the morning and you're happy to go to work, then you know you've found the right thing for yourself. a major in CS doesn't restrict you. it's quite the contrary. you can choose to do a lot of things, since IT does not only consist of programming positions.
nice new features. the diamond operator looks good. closures will be fun, too! starts to feel like C# (automatic resource management (C#'s IDisposable), language support for collections, strings in switch).
thanks for the alternative link and the hint regarding Slideshare. next time when I find an interesting presentation on Slideshare I'll look out for an alternative link.
_why really deserves this tribute! he created great things and I always liked _why's idea of bringing programming to a wider audience (especially children). reading through john's post and thinking about the mystic (and very smart) person _why was, I'm really sad about the fact that he disappeared online!
I totally agree with you! the code is definitely more readable. I think the object initalizer (e.g. var o = new MyObject(){ID=123};) was a step in the direction of named parameters.
C# (.NET 3.5) misses one type of method argument: the default parameter (it will be shipped with .NET 4.0). I have to admit, it happened only once that I missed default parameters in C#. however, there's a workaround to solve this problem: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa287762(VS.71).aspx
schneier writes about how evil the flash cookies are, but he doesn't mention how to deactivate them. I did it (http://giu.me/s/ngaf8k), and that's how it went down (note: some flash applications won't work anymore after you deactivate the flash cookies!):
finally, excuse me that I didn't use the exact english description of each option. as you may guess, my settings are displayed in another language than the english one (it's the german one, to be exact :).
Sal received his MBA from Harvard Business School. He also holds a Masters in electrical engineering and computer science, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and a BS in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
...but I don't think that he's too poor to buy one. everyone has its own methods to work ;) he surely would draw better images, but I personally think that the quality of the lectures would remain on the same high level :)