[Seaside] REST, bookmarkable URL's

[Stephen Pair]

I think this is definitely an issue that should be addressed in some
way.  Consider that in Swiki.net, I need to follow the REST principles
because my users need to bookmark Swikis, pages, downloads, etc.
Seaside's current incarnation doesn't support that.  

But, I definitely do like the ease with which Seaside allows you to
build web apps.  It's sort of like VisualWave without the windowSpec
translation baggage plus support for the browser back button (at least
to some degree).

What I would like (and Avi and I have had some discussions about this)
is the ability to "mount" Seaside's components on any arbitrary URLs.
The Seaside component would be the "resource" (in REST terms).  Now, the
problem is then that the URL would immediately result in a forward to
another non-bookmarkable URL that controls the user interaction.

One way I thought that you could get around this would be to respond
with one full-size frame that essientially hides the codified URL from
the user (enabling them to bookmark the application's "mount-point"
URL).  However, this doesn't satisfy the REST priniples in that you
aren't responding with the actual resource, but rather a pointer to the
actual resource in the form of a frame.  This would make it difficult
for an automated interface to be able to fetch the contents of a
particular URL.

It is possible to do a "bookmark me" button in Javascript and that might
be a nice compromise.  Or, perhaps another possibility is to support
both the "bookmark me" button, and a framed response.  You could also
handle the automated interface by passign parameters in the URL (like
?auto=true&user=foo&pw=bar), which would disable the framed response and
could also provide an automated authentication capability (to avoid
walking through web pages to handle authentication).

One thing that is still happening in all of this is that any URL into a
Seaside system is going to result in an HTTP forward response (which
forwards to the codified session URL).  I think most HTTP clients
(including things like wget) can handle this just fine, but I thought
I'd mention it here in case anyone can think of a reason that this would
be an issue.

- Stephen

> -----Original Message-----
> From: seaside-admin@lists.squeakfoundation.org 
> [mailto:seaside-admin@lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf 
> Of Cees de Groot
> Sent: Thursday, January 02, 2003 9:24 AM
> To: seaside@lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Subject: [Seaside] REST, bookmarkable URL's
> 
> 
> Seaside (and in fact the app I'm working on myself) is in 
> conflict with REST because URL's don't define resources. I 
> vaguely recall that we had this discussion before - James 
> Robertson brought it up as an argument against packages like 
> Seaside (and, to be fair, VW's on VisualWave), and I couldn't 
> remember how the discussion was left over here.
> 
> I was wondering whether it would be possible to have, say, a 
> 'bookmark me' button on a page which would add a bookmarkable 
> URL to the browser's links. That's a) a matter of Seaside to 
> interpret the URL, ask for a login if necessary, and then 
> move to the indicated resource, and b) a matter of Javascript 
> (is it possible to add bookmarks from Javascript?).
> 
> -- 
> Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     
> <cg@cdegroot.com>
> GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD  1986 F303 937F 
> E098 9E8B Cogito ergo evigilo 
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