Posted on: September 6, 2005 in Technology, Coding
AJAX side effects
I’ve been busy adding some AJAX code to a new album/playlist module for Drupal. Since this is the first time I have really worked with the XMLHttpRequest stuff, I was surprised at how adding these calls actually made my code a bit cleaner. I felt like I was really able to base my code on the actions my module was going to perform, and as a bonus, I basically have a RESTful interface to my module as well! I don’t know why I never really thought about it, but someone would have to work actively to not let AJAX-ing some code open up a web service. You’ve got to like it when technology that is chosen (primarily) for user interface reasons, comes bundled with a few nice architectural bonuses.
It seems like as AJAX adoption continues, we should see a corresponding increase in RESTful web services being offered.
September 6th, 2005 at 11:12 pm
I predict that the vast majority of any new webservices will stay undocumented, though, as just like you, most people don’t make this realization right away. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms either. Interesting.
September 7th, 2005 at 5:03 pm
Thanks for the comment Robert. I’m not sure that I agree that most web API’s will stay undocumented. I think that you are certainly correct in the short term, but as more applications come online that consume and make use of web services, this could change. I think as operators of ‘Ajax-ified’ web sites realize that they already have a basic webservice infrastructure in place, (and that they can increase revenue) things will start to get documented pretty quickly.