Collaborative articulation of how abstraction and language is employed in the computational manifestation of numbers -- including analysis of the role of syntax, semantics, and meaning in the specification and use of software interfaces.

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Service interface experiences

Jacques Distler has an informative post about his experience in using the newly available National Weather Service XML data service.

What's interesting in this post for the Numbering Peano exercise is the story of how Distler comes to actually get it to work. What's interesting is how expectations are set by what the NWS says it's interface is, and how the errors returned don't make it easy to fix the code. Distler summarizes two lessons:

1. Well-formed, valid, input should produce well-formed output. The format parameter is declared to be of type xsd:string. If the string I send you isn’t one of the ones you were expecting, send me an error-response. Don’t let your application blow up in my face.
2. As Sam Ruby notes below, it would be better to send the response as XML, rather than as an escaped string.

Something to consider as we work through how sense is made from interface specifications.

posted by Bill Anderson at 12/9/2004 06:15:22 AM