I was recently listening to Jon Udell’s podcast conversation with Roy Fielding about HTTP, REST, WebDAV, JSR 170 and Waka. Lots of interesting tidbits in there but one in particular that I wanted to post on is with respect to JSR-170 and JSR-283; I’ve not heard these charactizations put quite as clearly before. Roy, being seen by many as the father of the REST architectural style (or at the very least, the one who captured and documented this in his PhD dissertation) stated that the JSR-170 and subsequent JSR-283 efforts are an attempt to take the engineering and architectural principles that had been applied to the web and apply them to communication inside the application server. The environment within the application server is clearly different from that of the web. Roy points out, for example that within the application server we don’t have the concerns around latency that we have when passing messages around the web, and JCR is optimized for the within the app server environment. He conceeds that as soon as JCR version 1.0 was complete then folks wanted to remote it – his answer put WebDAV over JCR. I’m in violent agreement on all points with the exception of the last – that is the subject of a future post.