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<p class=MsoNormal>I found this mailing list from the mjt site. Having
used Kid and Genshi, I’m very impressed with mjt. It’s now at
the top of the short list for a project I’m ramping up. Keep up the
good work. However, that’s not the reason for my email. Another
aspect of this project is also related to the work you are doing at freebase. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>I need a RESTful interface to my data. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>I’m going to build the controller myself and I’m
now in the process of designing the URL conventions. I was hoping to mimic
the conventions of some popular service or tool but that’s not
working out great.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>I looked at Amazon’s S3. The biggest problem
there is that as far as I can tell, the only query capability is a match at the
start of the key. Also, I’m also a bit worried about the flat
key/data model. That probably helps performance but it means that the object
lives in that place forever. So access to <a
href="http://mydata/invoices/1234/invoicelines">http://mydata/invoices/1234/invoicelines</a>
is impossible. I’d have to imbed the invoice key as the start of
the key for the invoicelines bucket or I’d have to store pointers to the
keys for the invoicelines inside the invoices/1234 object. Neither is a
good fit for my mental model which is a RESTful interface to (probably
normalized) table data.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>I looked at MS Code Named Astoria (<a
href="http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/gettingStarted.aspx">http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/gettingStarted.aspx</a>).
It’s closer to my tables of data mental model and it includes a lot of
the concepts that I was planning on including: skip/top, expand, callback,
orderby, etc. It specifies the python/javascript square bracket key
notation right in the URL so the address for invoice 1234 is <a
href="http://mydata/invoices%5b1234%5d/">http://mydata/invoices[1234]/</a> and
its lines are at <a href="http://mydata/invoices%5b1234%5d/invoicelines">http://mydata/invoices[1234]/invoicelines</a>.
It deviates from Python/JavaScript notation in that you can embed very simple
queries in the brackets. You could write http://mydata/invoices[OrderDate
gt '1998-1-1'], where “gt” means “>”. At first
blush I can’t think of a concrete objection to this but my instinct is that
this sort of thing should be done in the URL parameters. So I would
prefer <a href="http://mydata/invoices/1234">http://mydata/invoices/1234</a>
and <a href="http://mydata/invoices?OrderDate='%3e1998-1-1">http://mydata/invoices?OrderDate='>1998-1-1</a>'.
Also, it only supports eq, ne, gt, gteq, lt, lteq. I also need a way to
match strings with at least what freebase provides: startswith, endswith,
includes (discerned from running the query builder linked to in earlier posts);
or maybe something like SQL’s LIKE operator. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>I can sort of reverse engineer the freebase URL and query scheme
by looking at the output of the query builder (URL encoded JSON query string).
It looks like your scheme may be a better fit. Can I get access to the
freebase docs that fully describes the URL mechanisms? Also, I’d
like to hear your opinion on the Astoria URL scheme. Do you think square
bracket notation will be a problem down the road? <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>As an aside, I’m also curios about why implemented
your own database. I’m planning on using SQL.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Larry Maccherone<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Carnegie Mellon<o:p></o:p></p>
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