5th June 2009

Azure Blob Storage as a Good HTTP Application

As an old HTTP guy I often get nervous about new services. They tend to violate all sorts of key HTTP architecture concepts and just take advantage of the flexibility to do whatever.

I’ve been really happy to see that the Azure Blob storage actually gets this stuff right. They have valid REST semantics with a good URL namespace, support GET and PUT with the right kind of range headers, etag and conditional operation support. They have a smart design for uploading a large blob in multiple pieces (which works around one of the bigger flaws in the older WebDAV support), and all. Anyway, its great to see a team do all their homework and get these details right- I suspect this will really payoff over the long lifespan of a service as it fits in cleanly with rest of the web services world. (note- I’m not saying other competing products aren’t also doing these things right, I haven’t researched those details lately).

posted in Azure, Developers, Networking, Standards, Technology | 0 Comments

17th August 2008

Dare on the Essence of REST

Dare Obasanjo posted an excelent description of the essence of the REST architectural style. Very good write up and it includes some good history and theory.

posted in Developers, Networking, Software, Standards, Technology | 0 Comments

17th March 2008

Joel Spolsky on Standards

I’ve been involved in various standards efforts since 1993 and seen many sides of the coin. I’ve had the privilege of being involved in some things that worked out very well and have been widely adopted, and I’ve also got a few standards efforts that I put a lot of time into that didn’t work out so well.

When interacting with folks in the Standards community, developers who use those standards, and end-users that use these products. Typically they all really don’t “get” the world that the other folks live in. I’ve often had to explain to people that the standards process is kind of like making sausage- most people really don’t want to see in detail what goes into it…

Joel has written a really good explanation of the most fundamental conflicts involved in this whole space, the stress between the idealists and pragmatists with regards to interoperability and compatibility. Its a long read but worth every bit of it and I’m probably going to point lots of folks towards it so they can at least understand some of the difficult decisions involved in building new versions of something like a web browser.

posted in Standards, Technology | 0 Comments