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pmuellr is Patrick Mueller

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Wednesday, January 16, 2008

IDL vs. Human Documentation

Ping pong; in reply to Steve's post on the same subject ...

Like I said in my previous post, interface definition languages exist for machines to generate code. They're totally inadequate, though, for instructing developers on how to write code to use a service. The need for human documentation in this context isn't quaint or impractical at all - it's simply reality.

Steve also points out the reams of documentation produced by OMG, and produced about WS-*, over the years, as a proof point of this.

He's right. Programmers can not survive on IDL alone, or more generally, meta-data. Human language is still often required to express subtleties or non-intuitive aspects of programming libraries, services, etc., simply because we have no other formal means of doing so. Or you wouldn't want to read it, if we did. Human readable documentation is also key to providing overview, introductory, relationship, etc type of information.

I appreciate having that sort of documentation. Lots of it.

But here's what I see as reality: Flickr Services.

Overlook the fact that parts of the interface aren't terribly RESTy, if you're a REST purist. But go out on a limb for me, and pretend they did the right thing in terms of REST; it's not a big leap, I don't think. Let's ask some questions. Is there some kind of XML schema that describes the input and output documents of these service definitions? Nope; can't find one. What HTTP status codes might get returned? Not documented, though they define their own error codes returned in the HTTP response payload; that commonly seen pattern is something else we need to talk about, BTW. Are ETags in use? Last-Modified checking? Who knows. etc

So, keep in mind that this documentation is all you've got. I'm going to claim it's inadequate.

Now the kicker: this API is still perfectly usable! In fact, I use it every time I write a blog entry, via a GreaseMonkey script to generate my little flickr images with annotations. It's not rocket science! It's HTTP!

While the documentation isn't completely adequate, it's perfectly acceptable, because I'm only using a small number of the APIs. The fact that's it's inadequate is containable. As Steve has previously mentioned, it's easy to do REPL-ish experiments with REST APIs. Heck, Flickr includes an API "Explorer" on their site to let you play, live. Nice!

But here is my fear. It's early days for REST. I want to believe that we'll see lots of people using REST over the coming decade to provide 'API's to their services. Where the promise of DCE, CORBA, WS-* got mired down in their complexities, REST is simple enough to actually be practical.

And that's my tension. It's simple/easy (you pick your semantic) to do simple stuff. I'd like to make sure that it's possible to do hard stuff. What happens when I need to deal with MORE that just one interface, and those interfaces are BIGGER than Flickr's? I feel like we're going to get lost in a sea of differently inadequate documentation. Using meta-data to help describe at least the nuts+bolts layer, is something that can help. The trick is to make sure it doesn't get too much in the way, and that you can keep it in sync with your code. My belief is that both are entirely possible. BTW, the link in the sentence above is a couple steps back in this conversation thread, if you've lost your place.

Let me finish this with a challenge. We all agree that documentation is good. Do you think there's some kind of a standard 'template' that we might agree on, that could provide all the practical, required information regarding usage of REST services? All text, prose, for now; just identify the information actually required. That seems like a worth-while goal, especially to try to educate people on the "way of REST" - and I'm talking about RESTy service providers here. Lots of people don't get REST. Let's teach them, by example, and by the way, I'm sure I still have a lot to learn myself.

You never know; I may see that prose and say "My gods. I've been such a dumb-ass! I can see that there's no way to formalize that to some machine readable format!". But I'll bet you a beer, that I won't say that. Take that prose, create an XHTML template that you could style, morph it into a MicroFormat (might not be so micro), create a JSON mapping when JSON takes over the universe this year, etc. Now I got my meta-data and I'll stop yammering on about it (not likely). But baby steps for now. I'd be happy with prose for now. Let's go top-down.

One more final note :-) I wrote this post last night, before Tim Bray posted about 'therestfulway.com'. Synchronicity? Wouldn't it be great to have a whole site full of patterns, best practices, examples, etc on REST? I've posed this question before, and gotten some positive responses. But some action is obviously required. I can't do it alone, but I'd be happy to help. I'm willing to sign a waiver indicating I won't talk about meta-data for the first six months. Who can pass that up?

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