[Openstreetmap-dev] REST

[Matt Amos]

On Monday 18 July 2005 13:56, SteveC wrote:
> If we threw away the xmlrpc and had things RESTful
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer
> would that make people happy or sad?

interesting... this seems like a nice way to do the bridge pattern. 
iirc you can do this stuff completely transparently in ruby using 
method_missing and friends.

the only problem i can see is that of transactions, e.g:
1) A GETs foo.xml
2) B GETs foo.xml
3) A and B modify foo.xml
4) A PUTs foo.xml
5) B PUTs foo.xml

its the same kinds of problems that RCS, CVS and countless others have 
been dealing with for years: do you prevent (5), as RCS does, in 
which case you have to deal with horrible locking problems? 

do you allow error recovery at (5), as CVS/SVN do, but make the client 
and server slightly more complex? 

or do you just allow B to overwrite A? this might be the simplest, but 
if those changes have follow-on effects in the rest of the data 
structures (e.g: the deletion of a node or line affects other 
entities it may be part of)

as an aside: can anyone decode xml-speak well enough to tell me what 
the differences between REST and document/literal are?

cya,

matt
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