rest-core (3) (dev log)

from: Lin Jen-Shin (godfat)
date: Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 1:25 AM

Hi John,

I'd been thinking about rest-core for a while now.
During this, I didn't do anything on it. Yesterday,
someone was pining me about dm-is-reflective,
and I did fix some of the issues on it.
(still one bug, I'll fix it soon)
Then I dived into a hacking status.. finally :p? So I
came back to fix more tests in rest-core, regardless
I am still thinking about it.

Today, I'd fixed about 60% tests now.

I totally agree this:

> a good general principle is to regularly step back and evaluate
> what the single high-level goal of the project is, and then based
> on that, think about the simplest architecture is to just solve
> that exact problem (and sometimes this can mean taking out
features)

That's why I am pondering on rest-core for a while.

Jaime and I had some discussion about a kind of
error handling (though now I feel it's more a kind of
error notification) a few days or even weeks before.
I am not sure how do I convince people that because
this is a kind of notification, not really an error, so that
I feel it's better to put some event objects instead of
raising exceptions.

I shouldn't go into detail here, just want to show that
I am not so certain on many aspects of rest-core,
especially the more I did on it, the more complex it
got. Then I realized, actually rest-graph itself is really
complex! To generalize this complexity, make things
even more complex.

But the good news is, I think I'd conquered most of
the hardest problems... (yah, but who knows?)

And instead of pondering around, I guess it'd be
better to just finish it and see if it works. Actually,
I am not sure what's the "problem" rest-core should
solve, it's more like I feel this would have much
potential, and I want to see what could this solve.

Something like: "Could this make me feel easy to
build a linkedin or twitter client, instead of copying
codes around?" Without real codes, sometimes
it's really hard to imagine the detail. There are too
many "surprises" when one jumps into details.

So... I think I would keep trying until a linkedin or
twitter gem had been built on top of rest-core. For
now, I am still building the features from rest-graph.
For example, configs handling had not been done.

Meanwhile, feel free to discuss with me or ask me
anything. I just don't know where to start. :)
Maybe... explain the whole concept and draw some
diagrams (pseudo UML? XD) and glossary?

p.s. allow me to paste this mail (with some modification)
on my blog as a rest-core development log XD