Javascript is now an isomorphic language. By isomorphic we mean that any given line of code (with notable exceptions) can execute both on the client and the server. On the surface this seemingly innocuous property creates a number of challenges that are not solved by current MVC-based patterns. This article will explore some of these existing patterns, how both their implementation and concerns vary across languages and environments, and how they are not good enough for a truly isomorphic Javascript codebase. In conclusion, we will explore a new pattern: Resource-View-Presenter.

ROCA is an attempt to define a set of recommendations — independent of any particular framework, programming language, or tooling — that embodies the principles of what we consider to be good web application architecture. Its purpose is to serve as a reference, one that can be implemented as-is or be compared to other approaches to highlight diverging design decisions.

I'm beginning to see that some parts of the Web we take for granted are not what actually defines it. The Web is not HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It's not DOM, SVG, WebGL, PNG, or Flash. The Web is really just HTTP over TCP/IP. What gets transported over HTTP does not define the Web.

There is, however, one other characteristic that does define the Web, and that is the humble hyperlink. Links are a feature of HTML, but they are not limited to HTML. Links are the connections that give the Web its name, and links are the biggest thing missing from native platforms.

My definition of the Web then is resources loaded over the Internet using HTTP and then displayed in a hyperlink-capable client.

1 - Find the set of architecture properties of key interest[1]
2 - Formulate an active approach to defining our an architecture that
induces these properties[2]
3 - Then, using the collective knowledge of already existing styles [3]
4 - Develop a style that meets the needs of the identified problem domain

This process is the actual topic of Fielding's dissertation. "REST" is
just his example "step 4" from above.

The primary activity of the TAG is to develop Architectural Recommendations. The TAG findings listed below document fundamental principles that should be adhered to by all Web components. The TAG expects to include these findings in the TAG's Architectural Recommendations, to be published according to the requirements of the W3C Recommendation Track process.

The World Wide Web uses relatively simple technologies with sufficient scalability, efficiency and utility that they have resulted in a remarkable information space of interrelated resources, growing across languages, cultures, and media. In an effort to preserve these properties of the information space as the technologies evolve, this architecture document discusses the core design components of the Web. They are identification of resources, representation of resource state, and the protocols that support the interaction between agents and resources in the space. We relate core design components, constraints, and good practices to the principles and properties they support.

Presentation from Cesare Pautasso and Erik Wilde.

• There are two distinct relationships between names and things. Reference is different from access. The architecture of the Web determines access, but has no direct influence on reference
• Reference can be established by ostention or by description. Description is inherently ambiguous; ostention can be done only to accessible entities.
• Therefore, references to non-accessible entities - the vast majority of references - must be by description, and hence must be ambiguous.
• Reference to accessible entities still differs from access. Establishing reference by ostention requires naming conventions. Access is one form of ostention.

HTTP URIs, in the web architecture, have been used to denote documents -- "web pages" informally, or "information resources" more formally. However, with the growth of the Semantic Web, which uses URIs to denote anything at all, the urge to use and practice of using HTTP URIs for arbitrary things grew steadily. The W3C Technical Architecture group eventually decided to resolve the architectural problem that if an HTTP response code of 200 (a successful retrieval) was given, that indicated that the URI indeed was for an information resource, but with no such response, or with a different code, no such assumption could be made. This compromise resolved the issue, leaving a consistent architecture.

I believe that this solution enables people to name arbitrary
resources using the "http" namespace without any dependence on
fragment vs non-fragment URIs, while at the same time providing
a mechanism whereby information can be supplied via the 303
redirect without leading to ambiguous interpretation of such
information as being a representation of the resource (rather,
the redirection points to a different resource in the same way
as an external link from one resource to the other).

I didn't have this thought out a few years ago. It has only been in actually building a relatively formal system on top of the web infrastructure that I have had to clarify these concepts my own mind. I am forced to conclude that modeling the HTTP part of the web as a web of abstract documents if the only way to go which is practical and, by the philosophical underpinnings of the WWW, tenable.

history has shown that the HTTP protocol is a very flexible protocol and that not all implementations need to follow the example provided by Fielding in order to meet the needs of users. for example, RPC over HTTP works just fine for many cases; esp. those that do not require system stability on the scale of years/decades.

however, the more important it is for the solution to continue to operate (and evolve) over an extended period of time, the more useful are the additional constraints Fielding identified in his example and the more important it is to optimize for run-time stability over ease/speed of initial implementation.

URLs can be used to identify abstract concepts or other things that do not exist directly on the Web.  This is sensible, but it means that the same URL might be used in conjunction with four different (but related) things: a name, a concept, a Web location or a document instance.  Somehow, we need conventions for denoting these four different uses.  Two approaches are available: different names or different context.  The "different names" approach requires new URI schemes or conventions; the "different context" approach requires syntactic conventions for indicating the intended context.

This document analyzes the definition of "resource" in RFC2396 [1] in an attempt to understand it.  It notes ten questions or points of confusion (labeled QUESTION1 - QUESTION10) that I encountered.
 
WARNING: This analysis is painfully detailed, and somewhat rambling (sorry!), reflecting my thought process as I (honestly) attempted to understand the definition.  It is only recommended to those who believe that the definition is clear, and want to see evidence to the contrary.

Microservices developed by a European-funded development collective whose aim it is to promote the interoperability of the tools and methodology we use in the field of digital scholarly editing and research.

Micro services are small cloud deployed web services supporting specific tasks in (any) digital work flow pertaining to larger scholarly tasks. They are the small reusable web published building blocks of digital scholarly tools. They provide the basic solution to interoperability and sustainability for digital scholarly tools Interedition is striving for.

Tim Ewald explains why hypermedia is good for system integration through services –providing support for evolution, service request routing, and application recovery-, and how to build such services.

Oui is a kit and framework for building larger websites, in the same fashion as networked and distributed desktop applications.

All code is modern JavaScript -- Node.js for the server and in the browser at the client side.
The user interface is completely handled client-side
Client-server communication is REST-ful and exchange structured data (JSON)
All JavaScript, HTML and CSS is namespaced (derived from file structure)

This is a place for exploring aspects of implementing applications using the REST architectural style. This may include statements about existing frameworks and libraries, general discussions about the nature of the style and how it may be expressed and/or encouraged via a programming framework, etc.

We have traditionally analyzed collections of information or things using categories like libraries, museums, archives, content or knowledge management systems, and data repositories. The concept of an organizing system complements this categorical view with a dimensional perspective that sees these categories as sets of design patterns that reflect typical answers to questions about what is being organized, why, when, how much, who is doing the organizing, and how services are provided to interact with the organizing system. These dimensions frame trade-offs and constraints about the content, policies, and implementation of organizing systems. The primary goal of this course is to use these design dimensions to better understand traditional design patterns and their consequences, and to identify useful new ones.

For example, the thingness, uniqueness, persistence, useful lifetime, mashability, and intended uses and users of the content of an organizing system jointly determine how it is implemented and operated. We will examine how these design influences intersect, and consider what alternative designs would look like if some of these content and policy choices were to change. Furthermore, in many domains the Web has become the default implementation of organizing systems interfaces, yet we don't critically examine the implications this should have on the system itself. So we will study how Web Architecture — or the architectures and constraints implied by other metamodels and architectures such as Linked Data or WS-* services — influence decisions about content granularity and structure, how identity and provenance are supported, the kinds of interactions and services the organizing system allows, and so on.

oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly.

The illustrations of TokyoGenso (a.k.a. Tokyo Fantasy) depict a post-apocalyptic Tokyo devoid of people and overtaken by nature.

Shinjuku skyline [+]

Tokyo Big Sight [+]

Rainbow Bridge [+]

Moai statue at Shibuya station [+]

Kabuki-za Theater, Ginza [+]

Mode HAL iKO Building, Shinjuku [+]

Poster for "The Book of Eli" (Japanese title: "The Walker") [+]

Gundam // Tokyogenso Robot

Tokyo Sky Tree [+]

Sofmap Akihabara [+]

Haneda Airport [+]

Cover of Liberal Time, September 2010

Akihabara [+]

Saigō Takamori statue, Ueno

Poster for "The Book of Eli" (a.k.a. "The Walker) - Osaka version [+]

Osaka street scene - Tsūtenkaku Tower [+]

Osaka street scene - Billiken [+]

Osaka street scene [+]

Hato Bus [+]

Tokyo Monorail [+]

Shibuya station (Fukutoshin Line) // Seibu Shibuya

"Manneken Pis" statue at Hamamatsuchō station

Ueno [+]

Tokyo Tower [+]

Shinjuku station [+]

Hanayashiki amusement park, Asakusa [+]

McDonald's [+]

Yoyogi station [+]

Nakano station [+]

Akihabara [+]

Shibuya [+]

Wako Building, Ginza [+]

[Links: tokyogenso blog, pixiv, deviantART]

I see signs that the essential freedoms of the web are being undermined by a cadre of companies through the introduction of new technologies and interfaces that, combined, may spell the death of the URL.

There has been a lot of confusion from a wide varying uses use of this term for various different historical reasons, leading to uses which are sometimes ambiguous and in places inconsistent. This article attempts to shed light on the issue.

“Portable clouds” is a name for the idea that the “cloud” of the Internet is / can be made portable by copying portions of it onto your local networks, desktops and portable devices. Another way to say this is: really great replication and caching of the web.

Implementing rev=canonical short URLs in Django.

RevCanonical is url shortening with a twist. Instead of creating its own super short versions of links, it checks to see if the link owner has published a shortened version of the given page using HTML link element. If not, we just return the original URL. And you should bug the link owner about providing a better alternative.

The server forwards from the identification URI to the generic document URI. This has the advantage that clients can bookmark and further work with the generic document. This setup should be used when the RDF and HTML (and possibly more alternative representations) convey the same information in different forms.

It would seem important that the Web easily enable small-time users of data to efficiently communicate with one another, without the need to have one of the giants as an intermediary.

SLurl provides direct teleport links to locations in Second Life. If you have Second Life installed, clicking on the map link will automatically teleport you to that location in-world.

A REST API should spend almost all of its descriptive effort in defining the media type(s) used for representing resources and driving application state, or in defining extended relation names and/or hypertext-enabled mark-up for existing standard media types. Any effort spent describing what methods to use on what URIs of interest should be entirely defined within the scope of the processing rules for a media type (and, in most cases, already defined by existing media types).

This two-part article is a step-by-step guide for those wishing to create new taxonomies for their business unit, or client. It will outline the many different elements that make up a quality taxonomy and the pitfalls you should be aware of when starting a new project.

Under what conditions is decentralization of facilities rational for a client-centered system of service or administration, and when is great centralization more cost-effective?

REST is defined by four interface constraints: identification of resources; manipulation of resources through representations; self-descriptive messages; and, hypermedia as the engine of application state.

REST maximizes the growth of identified information within a multi-organizational, network-based information system, which increases the utility of the system as a whole.

Conveyor can be used like an application-agnostic version of MySQL binlogs, which can be replayed to write data into multiple, diverse data stores.

The Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) is an architecture and software framework for creating, discovering, composing and deploying a broad range of multi-modal analysis capabilities and integrating them with search technologies.

A software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby.

Views map keys to values, where the key is automatically indexed and can be used to filter and/or sort results. Keys can be any JSON object, which enables a whole class of tricks that are rather non-obvious…

Note: trying to filter by state, or country is very difficult with our current data. The U.S. cities are pretty good but international location data is very spotty.

The significance of the whole URI in a representation language designed for human consumption is likely to be different than its significance in a language designed for machine consumption. What matters is consistency in the protocol.

Instead of pointing directly to the location of an Internet resource, a PURL points to an intermediate resolution service.

Rison is a slight variation of JSON that looks vastly superior after URI encoding.

If we’re aggregating (and building UI for) ’social web’ claims about the world rather than simple buddylists, I suspect aggregators will get burned unless they take care to keep careful track of who said what.

The research described here aims at building time-varying 3D models that can serve to pull together large collections of images pertaining to the appearance, evolution, and events surrounding one place or artifact over time.

Liverpool project to integrate the Fab4 (Multivalent) browser, the Cheshire XML search engine, and the Kepler (Ptolemy) workflow engine.

SVG fonts and animation are not on the development schedule for Firefox 3. Here are some thoughts about what would be needed to implement these features.

To be considered a "featured modeler", models should be developed with efficiency in mind, creating the most beautiful result with the least amount of polygons as possible.

Guide to major architectural works in Tokyo.

It’s no wonder so many WordPress blogs look like Kubrick or Hemingway with the colors and banner images changed. The templates are just too hard to edit. I’ve looked for a loose “wireframe” theme for WordPress to no avail.

He was in the vanguard of a relatively small group who fervently, indeed religiously, believed in the curative power of good design when applied to all aspects of American life.

Lih can link to Esshay's messages, in the context in which they were made, to build his case.

Using the latest laser-scanning technology, CyArk collects the most accurate 3D models of World Heritage Sites and stores them safely in a publicly accessible archive.

Our bet is that most of these companies will realize that they can become even more efficient if they rely upon a few, highly competitive and deeply technical infrastructure suppliers. Engineering for scale matters.

Common patterns of how AJAX interfaces look, and what users can do with them.

A brief history of the office as a specialized building type.

Web 2.0 enthusiasts believe that the contents of user-content databases represent the preferences and interests of everyone instead of the somewhat self-reinforcing interest clusters of a technologically savvy elite.

A new verb could be defined that accepted a list of resource representations, including any ID/IDREF attributes required to express the graph relationships over the elements in the XML document, and PUT each of them in turn.

The client can modify any part of the structure without concern for the origin server for that element, and the server can difference the PUT-back representation to discover changes, validate permissions, and commit permitted changes.

Seagull is an object oriented framework written in PHP that focuses on best practices, clean code and reusable components.

AJAX nerds discover persistent HTTP connections, Flash programmers wonder what the big deal is.

You can now build your own Flamenco navigation system!

Frame 1 contains a bounding box or any graphics that serve as placeholders for the final art. Frame 2 contains all other assets, including graphics and base classes, used by the component.

All rooms were decorated by a renown artist, whereby the entire room was included in the concept.

A concept is suggested that allows building context and structure around the content and existing information organization, using trails, or paths, through the Wiki content.

The architecture of the narrative present in the movie "Fight Club", completely built with Lego blocks.

From the microkernel to the upper layers NetKernel uses a generalization of REST, the basis for the successful operation of the World Wide Web, and applies it to the finest granularity of resource oriented software composition.

OGLE (i.e. OpenGLExtractor) is a software package by Eyebeam R&D that allows for the capture and re-use of 3D geometry data from 3D graphics applications running on Microsoft Windows.

Privacy is a complex and often abstract topic: this symposium will address "visual privacy," a subset of the much broader topic of data privacy, and bring together experts from a range of perspectives.

A page of possible key/encoded-value pairs that would be useful for OpenURL linking to music.

A seemingly random smattering of elements that, viewed from a specific point in space, coalesce into a tangible planar element.

This document is a set of good practices to improve implementations of HTTP and related standards as well as their use.

Extending the Web to support multiple modes of interaction.

This Auburn University School of Architecture Wiki serves to protect the delicate collaborative environment of Design Studio culture, and to serve as a protocol and reference guide to keep these balances in check.

This paper attempts to capture some of the early reasoning which shaped the Internet protocols.

This paper presents a design principle that helps guide placement of functions among the modules of a distributed computer system.

The kinds of file structures required if we are to use the computer for personal files and as an adjunct to creativity are wholly different in character from those customary in business and scientific data processing.

It is an open, industrial-strength, scaleable and extensible platform for creating, integrating and deploying unstructured information management solutions from combinations of semantic analysis and search components.