[mapguide-internals] RESTful Ramblings of a Restless Lunatic

[Robert Bray]

Jason Birch wrote:
> Bob wrote: 
>>>  Jason Birch wrote:
>>> - I also would like to see the default representation as HTML, with lots
>>> of <a> links. :)
>> Yea ok :;
> 
> Well, I was partially serious about this one.  We have to be careful to exploit the linkability that RESTfulness gives us.  It may require some re-thinking of how XML and JSON responses are returned, as I think they currently reference things like Library:// rather than a real URL. 

Yea this was bugging me the whole time I was writing the document and 
you are right, it's almost like we have to re-write the ResourceID 
references in the outbound responses and convert them back again in the 
inbound requests. This seems really ugly to me but I don't know any 
other way around it unless we re-think / change what a resource id is.

>  
> I also think that it might be valuable to represent the tiled maps in an identical way to the physical directory structure on the server.  This would mean that the web servers could either alias in or rsync the physical cache directory from the site server, and only go through the MapGuide API on error (404).  Or, ideally, we could move the tile storage stuff to the web tier, with generation remaining at the site server.  Maybe I'm way off base, but I think that this might allow for easier caching, load balancing, etc.

How far off from that am I? I'll have to have a quick look and see, but 
I think it is fairly close.

>  
> Hmm.  Another potentially thorny issue.  Will restfulness restrict us to DNS round-robin load balancing on the web tier?  If you have the same resource on multiple hosts, thinking about pulling a resource from one host and writing it back to another gives me a semantics headache. :)

This is an uglier and thornier problem of resource database replication, 
which I would like to leave out of this discussion. We can pick up this 
topic in a separate thread / proposal.

>  
> Jason
> 
> 
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