I have just been reading up on REST again, since I found a very palatable pair of articles (REST intro, and practices). This got me thinking about the state of OMBase, and the integration of our presentation pipeline into the OMBase interface. It is RESTful, since we have MMT addressing via URIs implemented. You just use a GET to retrieve them.
What I have talked with Florian about, but maybe not with the OMBase team, is how to integrate presentation. That should be very simple from the interface point of view: we just take the same URLs, but a different HTTP header.
GET /arith1/lcm
Host: cds.omdoc.org
Accept: application/omdoc+xml
gives you the OMDoc file and
GET /arith1/lcm
Host: cds.omdoc.org
Accept: application/xhtml+xml
gives you the presented version (with the standard options). Now, we have written a paper about presentation and submitted it to MKM and Christine has spent a lot of ingenuity on defining user options to the presentation process.This should be easy to integrate with the URI query interface:
GET /arith1/lcm?ext=foo.ntn∫=lang:ntn;style:physics
Host: cds.omdoc.org
Accept: application/xhtml+xml
That should do the trick.
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Firstly, I read the introductory article to REST with very much interest and attention, and I must say that it changed a lot of the principles on which I treated the concept (or better yet, it consolidated some of them). It just makes me ponder how much I realize at this point and would go back to the very details of the code and change them accordingly. For example, DELETING being idempotent, POST and PUT having basically the same functionality with the former being hazardous, are the points where I would begin. Not to mention adding hyperlinks somehow inside the results that point to other operations at the respective point.
On integrating the presentation, it has not occured to me the different handling of GET requests by having different MIME types. To start with this, I found the notations paper in Christine’s publications page.