Simon Willison’s Weblog

RESTLog

23rd November 2002

Joe Gregorio’s RESTLog is a fascinating piece of technology and a great example of the RESTian model of web service in action. Everything is built on XML and HTTP—new blog entries are POSTed to the index page as RSS 2.0 item elements, edits are done with the little-used HTTP PUT method and the DELETE method can be used to delete items. Content negotiation is in effect, so browsers recieve HTML while aggregators theoretically get RSS (though in practise existing aggregators fail to send a content negotiation header so an alternative URL scheme must be used). It’s very clever stuff. Further techie details are being posted on a regular basis, but a good overview can be had by reading RESTLog Overview and RESTLog Interface. The system was inspired by the RESTWiki’s RestidyingBlogger.