A game I sometimes play when inflicting my presentation skills upon developers is to ask the simple question “so when do you use HTTP POST as opposed to GET?” Depressingly the answers always involve the length of ‘URLs’, size and complexity of content being sent and worst of all, hiding pages from users. Occasionally some bright spark may highlight how the browser won’t resend a POST without a dialogue, but I’ve not yet been given an answer which involved the word verb, let alone safety.

So it should have come as no surprise when reading the O’Reilly PHP in a Nutshell (November 2005, first edition, wonder what took them so long?) this afternoon that in a section discussing GET and POST, there is no mention of safety.

Of course this is fairly topical with the fallout following Google’s Web accelerator (They’re baaaaaaack, Back with a vengence) just surfing around and kicking off all sorts of weird and wonderful side-effects - click here to launch the nukes!

In WSDL, we had several rounds of fairly heated discussion on just this issue surrounding describing safe operations, many people being of the opinion that frameworks and tools can’t detect when an operation is ’safe’, and developers don’t care anyway. For my money any tool or Web framework worth writing your code inside out for should fire up a dentist’s drill, slap you around the face and repeatedly ask IS IT SAFE? until it GET’s a straight answer.

Technorati Tags: HTTP, w3c, webarch, WebServices

The W3C has announced the XML Schema Patterns for Databinding Working Group. This follows discussions at the W3C Workshop on XML Schema 1.0 User Experiences, and will hopefully address concerns raised by the formation of the WS-I Schema Workplan Working Group. The Charter lays out the problem to be solved and the scope of the work nicely: essentially we are going to collect patterns of XML Schema 1.0 which should work well with toolkits and document them with test cases.

As Chair, I hope to keep the ball rolling fairly within the W3C Process, however as a member, I’m keen to see that the patterns published don’t alienate those of us who continue to prefer to continue to work with XML directly. Then there’s that all important mention of versioning.

Finally, of course, without good participation, the working group doesn’t really exist and so I’d encourage anyone with a steak in the interoperability of Web services to seriously consider joining.

Technorati Tags: databinding, WS-I, schemaexperiences, w3c, WebServices, XML

Geneva is a set of 120 odd photos from a long weekend away with the family in Genève.

Technorati Tags: flickr, photography

I usually enjoy ongoing, but having just read Internet Stamps, I’m wondering if October the 16th is Canadian Fool’s Day, or something? Charles Babbage apparently proposed the original fixed price postage model that lead to the Penny Black, but introducing national Post Offices to the Internet is a really bad idea and I ain’t buying it.

Flickr dpreview linker is a Greasemonkey script i’ve knocked up to turn the “Taken with a ..” text on flickr photo pages into a Google I’m Feeling Lucky search of dpreview.com/reviews. Useful when you wonder what camera people have been using. Not so useful if they’ve photoshop’d the Exif metadata into oblivion. Enjoy! Update: now works with flickr gamma

Technorati Tags: dpreview, flickr, greasemonkey, photography

Yet another loverly visualisation toy from Jim. Being an engineer, what interests me most is how it was made.

Technorati Tags: art

The Writer records a family day out on Hampstead Heath to see Giancarlo Neri’s big table and chair.

Technorati Tags: flickr, photography, art

Those of us faced with the reality of Web services Interoperabilty in a post-soapbuilders world and who rue the absence of any serious practical testing from the WS-I will be pleased to hear that Microsoft are holding an Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Plug Fest. So long as everyone strives to interoperate with Indigo, we’ll all interoperate with each other, right?

Technorati Tags: interoperability, WebServices

Palo Alto is a set of snaps taken during last week’s W3C Web Services Addressing and Web Services Description face-to-face meetings hosted by TIBCO in the Bay Area. It is my full intention to geotag this little lot!

Technorati Tags: w3c

According to the Nerd?, Geek? or Dork? test, I’m 78 % Nerd, 52% Geek, 39% Dork. There’s 5 minutes I’ll never get back.