Sam Ruby: Shades of Grey

@btrott @djacobs so good that this was ten years ago.

(sorry for the delay, the first version of this article died in a spectular system crash) Nelson Minar and Sam Ruby point out that Google is an interesting corner case in its adaption to the Web architecture. Because it uses an "innovative" business model for its new "API", it presents an interesting engineering challenge. Basically the problem is that there are a variety of benefits to exposing Google's data as URI-addressable, GET-fetchable data. Many people have heretofore agreed that this is the right thing. The problem is that in a very subtle way, the Google API is not idempotent. Multiple calls to the service do not return the same thing. This is because every user is allowed only 1000 calls per day so each of them increments an implicit counter. Orgthogonal to the issue of GET versus POST and Web architecture versus RPC, I'll point out that implicit service state i...

Full article: http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2002/09/02/Shades-of-Grey