ROA for newbies

CC By-SA © 2011 Andrés Leonardo Martínez Ortiz. Some rights are reserved. This document is distributed under the ”Attributions-ShareAlike 3.0” Creative Commons License available here.

Web APIs are becoming in a “de facto” operating system. By using these abstractions developers populate Internet with m2m services i.e. with new APIs. The main criteria of this process are mainly usability, fostering the service integration or creation mash-ups. However there exists some theoretical framework backing this phenomenon: Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA).

In this post I review one of the classical references about this topic, the book “RESTful Web Services” by L. Richardson & S. Ruby (O’Reilly 2007). Even though it could be considered an old reference and even the authors recognize that the ROA term could be controversial, for lots developers this books is the first step in the path of web programming. In this post, some basic concepts and principles will be presented, letting some design clues for the followings.

Empathic review of thoughts in crisis

My personal review about "The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis" of J. Rifkin.

This kind of books shows an ideal future built on top of personal best wishes and at the same time many of the risks that will make imposible to reach that future. Unfortunatelly the book doesn't contain any tactics to reach the described future. The book seems to feed the readers' fear to drive them to certain opinions.

Mr Rifkin merges together data coming from different sources but he is unable to create a logical narration supporting the tittle of the book. Nonetheless, the bibliography included seems to be more solid.

All the long Mr. Rifkin affirms one thing and its contrary, seemingly trying to make feel everyone happy. To make everything worse, he follows approaches of postmodernism and deconstructivism, which have showed so interesting in many areas but not in the social and political sciences.