I want to like SCXML, but executable XML is a bit of a two-bagger
Over the past few days I have been reading up on the State Chart XML spec. Ever since reading some of Stu Charltons ideas on a RESTful Hypermedia Agent and listening to his WS-REST keynote presentation, I’ve taken more of…
Handy URI Templates 1.1.2 Released
After a few weeks of tweaking, I put out a new release of Handy URI Templates. What’s important about version 1.1.2 is that it is now being tested against the uritemplate-test suite started by Mark Nottingham. Most importantly, it is…
Fun with URI Templates and the Facebook Graph API
URI Templates can make interacting with the web APIs like the Facebook Graph API a little easier. Here, I’ll show you how you can use URI Templates to create request URIs into the Facebook Graph API using the Handy URI…
A URI Templates Implementation for Java
In my copious spare time, I have managed to cobble together an initial implementation of the URI Templates spec (RFC6570), for Java. The project is up on GitHub here: http://github.com/damnhandy/Handy-URI-Templates The majority of the documentation is available in the README file,…
RESTful URIs, Unicorns, and Pixie Dust
It often pains me to hear people talking about so-called “RESTful URLs”. If you’re using that term, or your spending the majority of you application planning designing URI structures rather than your media types, then chances are you don’t really…
URL vs. URI: URLs as Queries and URIs as Identities
Continuing my with my ranting about the URL vs. URI bit, I thought I’d continue on given my renewed interest in this topic thanks to Ora. In our LEDP position paper, we made the observation that URLs represent queries while…
W3C Linked Enterprise Data Workshop and more about URLs vs. URIs
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the W3C workshop on Linked Enterprise Data Patterns. My colleague Ora Lassila and I gave a presentation on the isues of identity in Linked Data. You can read our position paper and…
URL vs. URI vs. URN: The Confusion Continues
A year has passsed since my last post on URIs and URLs and it would seem that some of the concepts are still lost on some folks. With that said, I figured I’d throw up another post that I could try…
Protocol Buffers are not very “RESTish”.
There’s been a lot of activity recently around highly optimized, binary serialization formats such as Google Protocol Buffers and Thrift. There have been some attempts to include formats such as Protocol Buffers into their “REST API” because of perceived performance benefits…
URL vs. URI vs. URN, in More Concise Terms
Without a doubt, the URL vs. URI post is by the most visited page on this blog. Even so, there’s still a lot of confusion on the topic and so I thought I’d break it down in less words. The…



