[cola:09662] What is Resty?

["Frederick Noronha (FN)" <fred@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.resty.org/book/view/4

About Resty
Submitted by sandeep on Wed, 05/26/2004 - 17:16.
Resty is a Web Application Framework distributed under the terms of the 
GNU General Public License.

After years of developing web applications I wanted a framework that would 
make my job easier by doing all the things that were common between all 
the projects and make certain architectural/style decisions for me. So I 
Google'd and found a zillion libraries and frameworks. I went through them 
one by one and discovered that each had its limitations and restrictions. 
Apart from that I was worried by the "Consumption Costs" (The 
Time/Resources involved in learning and using) of these system.

Along the way I stumbled upon Drupal, which I used at work and for a few 
of my own projects. What I liked about Drupal was the way it was written. 
Everytime I find some new free/open-source software, I first browse 
through its CVS. At this point I've almost made up my mind if I like it or 
not. I know for sure after I have gone through the documentation and on 
how helpful the community around it is. Drupal scored high on all three 
counts but there was something about it that made me uncomfortable. I 
wanted the framework to be "stupid". Drupal is not. Infact Drupal is very 
intelligent.


"Why does the Framework have to be stupid", you ask?
So that it does not get in the way of what I want to do with it. Being 
"stupid" also means that it will be flexible because "Today's optimization 
is tomorrow's bottleneck". "Stupid" also means "marked by a lack of 
intelligence" so that the Framework would be simple as opposed to being 
complex. This also reduces the Consumption Costs of the Framework.

So I set out to write a Drupal inspired Stupid Framework.

In the meantime, I stumbled upon REST and I knew that my Drupal inspired 
Stupid Framework had to be RESTful to take advantage of the architecture 
of the web and the benifits that come with it.

And thats how Resty came into existence. Resty is designed to be as 
"stupid" as possible so that it does not get in the way of what a 
developer wants to do with it and at the same time provides a simple and 
useful abstraction based on REST. Resty is also minimalistic and does not 
try to do everything. The aproach to designing Resty was: "It ain't done 
when there's nothing to add to it, but when there's nothing to take away 
form it!".

Wait a minute! If Resty is "stupid" why do I need it?
Like I said before, I needed a framework that:
1. made some architectural decisions for me, and
2. did some of the commmon tasks involved in most web applications.

Well, Resty's core does 1 and by adding libraries to it you can do 2.

So why is 2 not a part of Resty?

Apart from the reasons I have given above to why the Framework has to be 
"stupid", there is the matter of choice for the developer and the 
possibility that an increase in its capabilities might lead to an increase 
in time/effort involved in configuring it and finding ways to make that 
configuration easy.

- Sandeep

FORWARDED BY FN
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Frederick Noronha (FN)                    Nr Convent Saligao 403511 GoaIndia
Freelance Journalist                      P: 832-2409490 M: 9822122436
http://fn.swiki.net                       http://fn-floss.notlong.com
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