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MEST Again

Stefan Tilkov,

Savas has written a very good post on MEST — this time, I find it hard to disagree with anything he’s written. Has my perception changed, or is it that he phrases things a little differently?

Here are the points he lists about MEST:

  • There are no directly bindable resources and hence no bindable state (or state representation). This, of course, does not mean that there is no state in our distributed application. It’s just that state is not bindable;
  • There are no ‘clients’, ‘servers’, ‘consumers’, etc.; only services that exchange one-way messages;
  • There are no concepts like ‘object’, ‘resource’, ‘interface’, ‘operation’, ‘inheritance’;
  • Messages are combined in interesting ways to create protocols;
  • Application semantics are associated with protocols (descriptions of how messages with well-defined structure can be combined).
  • It is possible and desirable to associate semantics with the data transferred as payload of messages (e.g. using RDF or a specification document for a particular namespace written in English)

I’m not entirely sure I understand the first point, but the rest makes a lot of sense to me.