Random evening http://del.icio.us/ browsing brought be across http://www.mnot.net/python/http/, which is awesome. I was having similar fun over the weekend utilizing python’s support for overriding the behavior of the dictionary-syntax with __{get,set,del}item__.

It’s a similar type of beauty as the constrained interface of HTTP … the power comes in some part because of the interface constraint…

In any case, his example makes it slightly unclear what the mapping is…

web = Dict()

GET

getResp = web[’http://asynchronous.org/blog’]

PUT

web[’http://asynchronous.org/blog’] = newData

DELETE

del web[’http://asynchronous.org/blog’]

POST

postResp = web(’http://asynchronous.org/blog’, newResourceData )

Very cool.

Update: More from the source.

The New York Times reaches about 1.5 million people. This posting is possibly of interest to two dozen. But the difference between my blog and the NYT is that my post will reach those two dozen :)

— raph

• Synergy / http://synergy2.sf.net/
• Multi-{platform,machine} keyboard/mouse transport; use two desktops from one machine.
• Nomic game on c2 wiki / http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?NomicGame
• Why is it that even though I’ve spent time looking around the c2.com wiki, I’ve never seemed to see it all?
• Gnome Desktop integration bounties / http://www.gnome.org/bounties/#categories
• An idea who’s time has come. With all this open code around, let’s get it talking to eachother!
• D-BUS / http://freedesktop.org/Software/dbus/doc/dbus-tutorial.html
• Hmm. I guess HTTP doesn’t solve all problems. ;) Still, I think application-application level networking is best solved with HTTP and something like an MONITOR verb in HTTP…
• High-concurrent-performance server computing
• C10K / http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html
• High-Perf Server Architecture / http://pl.atyp.us/content/tech/servers.html
• Brilliant > “Efficient locking schemes are notoriously hard to design, because of what I call Scylla and Charybdis after the monsters in the Odyssey. Scylla is locking that’s too simplistic and/or coarse-grained, serializing activities that can or should proceed in parallel and thus sacrificing performance and scalability; Charybdis is overly complex or fine-grained locking, with space for locks and time for lock operations again sapping performance. Near Scylla are shoals representing deadlock and livelock conditions; near Charybdis are shoals representing race conditions. In between, there’s a narrow channel that represents locking which is both efficient and correct…or is there? Since locking tends to be deeply tied to program logic, it’s often impossible to design a good locking scheme without fundamentally changing how the program works. This is why people hate locking, and try to rationalize their use of non-scalable single-threaded approaches.”
• SEDA / http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/seda/
• SEDA slides / http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/talks/seda-lecture-stanford.pdf
• Stanford lecture on Staged Event-Driven Architecture [SEDA] … pretty, detailed gnuplot graphs. ;)
• Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for high-concurrency servers) / http://www.usenix.org/events/hotos03/tech/full_papers/vonbehren/vonbehren_html/index.html
• Not anti-SEDA, but pro-threads, and pro-thread-advancement. Advocates a hybrid model where well-implemented user-level] threads are used with a limited number of event-based stages.
• Extreme Markup Languages 2002 — Paul Prescod : “Roots of the REST/SOAP Debate” / http://www.mulberrytech.com/Extreme/Proceedings/html/2002/Prescod01/EML2002Prescod01.html#t1
• Derivative Works [Parsing] / http://bobfoster.com/plog/index.php?m=200301#6
• Programming techniques from 1964 make the world go round.

• New hackers take on Web services — So it begins… Shock! Overly-complex vendor-specific protocols rushed to market are vulnerable to attack.
• More on Web services and distributed objects — Mark Baker puts into words better then I wanted to my reaction to the Werner Vogels IEEE Internet Computing article.
• A Software Customer’s Bill of Rights via [Freedom to Tinker] — I have a gut-level supportive reaction to this, but at the same time it’s been drilled into my head on many levels [this and architecture/design] that software is not like anything else, no matter how many analogies we try to make. At the same time, I can’t quickly see a cogent disagreement with the points here.
• Agile Testing Project — a good breakout of the why and why-for around test-cases.