nice new hackage urls

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2009-07-07 at 22:52 +0200, Johan Tibell wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 10:00 PM, Thomas DuBuisson
> <thomas.dubuisson at gmail.com> wrote:
>         > I now realise we need a bit more :-)
>         >
>         > So the issue is that we'd like to be able to specify a
>         server by a
>         > single URL and be able to find everything else relative to
>         that. Ideally
>         > we would do that by some discovery mechanism rather than
>         hard coding
>         > relative URLs into the clients, but in the mean time...
>         
>         
>         >From what you've said my imagination makes me think of a page
>         at
>         $URL/jumptable that gives a list of hard coded services and
>         their
>         location on the server.  For example, $URL/jumptable might
>         return:
> 
> To be RESTfull this should just be $URL to avoid forcing servers to
> have a resource called jumptable. 

What do real REST designs really do in this kind of situation? For the
parts of sites intended to be consumed by humans that's easy, you use
index.html and that provides links humans can choose to follow.

For sites where automated and somewhat-coupled clients (ie not totally
generic clients like caches, web spiders etc) are expecting certain
services (it is that expectation that is the coupling), how do they
discover the urls for the services they are (or might be) expecting?

Do people really concoct little text or xml files giving name -> url
mappings? Is there some common standard format for doing that?

Duncan