Benkler’s book is out

Yochai Benkler’s book, The Weath of Networks, is out. This is — by far — the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years. If there is one book you read this year, it should be this. The book has a wiki; it can be downloaded as a pdf for free under a Creative Commons license; or it can be bought at places like Amazon.

Read it. Understand it. You are not serious about these issues — on either side of these debates — unless you have read this book.

Using REST with Ajax

This article shows how to use Ajax techniques to make web apps with REST APIs.

Everyone's talking about REST these days. Lots of people are still struggling with it, and there's good reason for that--REST is actually quite difficult to fit into the browser-based HTML Web, for two reasons:

1. Current HTML forms support only GET and POST, not PUT or DELETE
2. HTML forms always involve a page change

As far as I'm concerned, this is fair enough; REST is primarily a web services platform, an alternative to CORBA, SOAP, and XMLRPC, not a user interface. Still, at least some of the time, it's nice to use a REST API as the foundation for a web app. On the other hand, Ajax can be really complicated, and it always seems to involve lots of different bits of code.

That is the point of this article. REST's clean definition of an application's architecture solves at least some of the problems with Ajax; and using Ajax to a REST web app leaves the REST API uncomplicated and pure.