I wish I was wrong. I wrote this post a while back, poking fun at Sun for creating an impossibly complicated RESTful API that will pain developers for years. I imagined an API that will require twenty lines of code for a simple hello world. Of course, I made it all up. Now I wish it was just a joke.
Contrast & compare. Compare that to ActiveResource which just went through some significant update. What you’re seeing here is the implementation, but a simple example fits in the first 18 lines of code. (Thanks Ryan).
Featuritis. Matt at 37Signals aptly defines it as In-store good vs At-home good. Which one would you rather buy? (Original research as PDF)
No surprise there. And two tidbits from the article: “One example he noted was the storage of a driver’s personal seat position in the car key. ‘It was done with good intentions, but if I take my wife’s key at some point and can’t find my own seat position any more, that tends to be annoying for me instead of comfortable.’” Remember, if people didn’t know it was doing the right thing to begin with, they can’t figure it out when it does the wrong thing.
On the other hand: “I have an electronic garage door opener. It works perfectly: I just push a big, obvious button on a simple, single-function control, and the garage door opens (or closes, depending on whether it was open or closed to begin with). I only needed to use the device once before I understood how it worked. It doesn’t do anything else, and it doesn’t have any fancy gimmicks.” It doesn’t have to be smart to make life easier.
Missing pieces. Tim Bray has some thoughts on what Ruby needs to be complete. I’m not big on IDEs, I’d like simpler than Vim/bash, but all good IDEs lead to Java. Got to agree with everything else. And by the end of the year, we might start seeing an influx of localhostAPIs (*cough*ActiveResource*cough*) to solve the integration problems. But then, I’m biased, and I’ll prove it by quoting: “Even with all these little irritations, Ruby might win, big-time; it’s that good.”
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