Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I guess that's what this technology brings to the table. (Whatever the 
> technology is actually called...)

Exactly. The general term is "remote procedure call", or "RPC".

> OOC, is there some better way rather than tunnelling over HTTP? Surely 
> somebody has already come up with sane designs for this?

Yes, and yes.  And, to answer your next question, yes.

>>> What's REST then?
>>
>> Representational State Transfer.   A set of rules that almost nobody 
>> who claims to use REST actually follows.
> 
> Sounds delightful.

To be a little less obtuse, it's a few guiding principles that make it 
possible to cache stuff and supposedly figure out interfaces on your own. 
Such principles include using a URL to identify every resource, and to have 
the body of resources include URLs to refer to other URLs; but the REST 
moniker requires much more to work "properly", including (for example) 
storing no "state" at the server.  In other words, HTML over HTTP, "done 
right" in some important senses, so that you can cache the results properly 
and etc.

People then take anything that encapsulates the request over HTTP in a way 
that assigns different URLs to resources to be "REST". That's a tiny and 
fairly useless part of it.

SOAP can't be "REST" because the URL identifies only the server and the 
function name and arguments go in the body of the request.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Why is there a chainsaw in DOOM?
   There aren't any trees on Mars.

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