Ernie Prabhakar gave a talk yesterday on what he now calls REX: REST-Enabled XHTML. This grew out his work with the microformats gang. Briefly:
- Your back end provides key/value pairs like vcard or icalendar.
- Your web view of the data is the corresponding format such as hcard or hcalendar.
- The the web application provides a REST-style interface to GET and POST records.
- Other applications can read the microformat, and either pick off records, or construct the appropriate REST url to GET the current record, or POST changes.
Ernie built a Core Data [ via Backup Brain ] application to populate a database, and hooked up a Ruby on Rails application to the resulting SQLite table to provide the web view.
