News You Can Bruise for 2012 December

Tue Dec 04 2012 11:03 Constellation Games Bonus Stories Now CC-Licensed: A few months ago when the Constellation Games serialization ended, some of the subscribers got four short stories along with their compiled ebooks; stories set before, during, and after the novel. The long-term fate of those stories was unclear. My publisher and I wanted to keep them scarce for a while to reward the loyalty of high-tier subscribers, but writing and editing these stories was a lot of work, so we wanted to make them available to the general CG-reading public. Possibly in exchange for money.

But it turns out there's not much money in nickel-and-diming you (specifically, there's about $0.15), so we've agreed to make all four stories available under the CC-BY-SA Creative Commons license. That's about seventeen thousand words of free fiction: the post-scarcity family drama of "The Time Somn Died", the foul-mouthed artistic angst of "Found Objects", the headshot violence of "Dana no Chousen", and the bubble-pipe erudition of "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans".

The catch is that the stories contain spoilers for Constellation Games, and won't really make sense unless you read the novel first. And the novel still costs $5. At least, that's the pro forma warning I feel like I need to give you. But I remember when I was a kid and I discovered that the Arvin Public Library had the third book of the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy but not the first two. I had no idea what was going on, who these characters were or why they were stranded in caveman times, but I devoured Life, the Universe, and Everything, reading it multiple times, and the lack of knowledge as to what was going on just made me determined to get a ride to the library in Bakersfield where I could check out the books that would explain it.

So... go ahead and read the stories first, if that's your thing. I think they might pique your curiosity. And remember that you can also read the first two chapters of Constellation Games online.

PS: if you order Constellation Games from the publisher you'll now get PDF copies of the bonus stories along with the ebook.

(1) Thu Dec 06 2012 08:23 End-of-Year Film Roundup: I was gonna wait til the end of the month for this but I have seen so many great movies recently that I want to tell you about them now.

This is a combination of movies I watched at the Museum of the Moving Image, usually with Sumana, and Criterion Collection movies, hurriedly purchased during the recent half-price sale, which we watched at home. I've put them roughly in reverse chronological order of when we watched them. Sumana also put up some short reviews recently. Don't want to read this huge post? Read Sumana's entry instead!

Incidentally, I love the name "Criterion Collection." "We only select movies that meet... a criterion!" It's like the "Un Certain Regard" award they give out at Cannes. I imagine a French person shrugging and going "eeeeeeeh..."

Céline et Julie vont en bateau - Phantom Ladies Over Paris (1974) - aka "Celine and Julie Go Boating" Yes, the original title is in both French and English. The film that made me decide to do this post now. I saw it on Sunday. It's amazing. But it's hard to describe; if I tried you'd think I was telling you about my boring dream. (Okay, I can describe the plot in one non-dreamlike sentence: two best friends discover a haunted house.)
This is not an easy movie. It's three hours long and takes about an hour to get started. Once it gets started, there's a lot of repetition, due to the holodeck-esque nature of the haunted house. But the enormous chemistry between the lead actresses won me over. I've never seen a better depiction of the endless in-jokes and stupid pranks of friendship. It's as if two Manic Pixie Dream Girls decided to stop finding boring guys to make over and just hang out together. Includes a reenactment of the Duck Soup mirror scene that might surpass the original.
Cat Scratch Fever (2011) - This film doesn't have a distributor, so I dunno how you can see it at this point, but you should know about it. It's a science-fiction comedy whose direct inspirations are "Primer" and "Celine and Julie Go Boating". (Two best friends discover they can watch alternate universe versions of themselves via Internet streaming video.) It lacks the rigorous confusion of "Primer" but it has the same no-fi aesthetic, and the lead actresses have some of the chemistry found in "Celine and Julie". The best part: it's fast. The movie's 72 minutes long and there's no repetition, even though "Primer" and "Celine and Julie" are based on repetition.
"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956). Great, creepy stuff. There's a stupid tacked-on framing device, but the framing device has Richard Deacon from The Dick van Dyke Show playing a doctor! Can't complain. Also can't look at Richard Deacon's IMDB page because I want to keep getting these surprises (see below).
"Night Train to Munich" (1940) - Sumana got this from Criterion thinking director Carol Reed was a woman. A 1940 war thriller directed by a woman would be an intriguing prospect indeed, but Carol Reed was a dude. Good movie, though. The beginning kept pulling the dramatic rug out from under the viewer. Surely our story begins now, with our heroine making her escape with a transfer at Munich... oh, the Nazis got her. Damn, how is she going to escape the prison camp... oh, she escaped. Well, it's a long way to England, surely she must make the first leg of the journey on some kind of "night train"... oh, she made it.
Shadow of a Doubt (1943) Excellent Hitchcock. (Hitchcock's favorite of his own movies.) Disturbing and meta, it knows you're watching it and mocks the whodunit conceptual framework you've brought to it.
All About Eve (1950) - So great. Full of witty dialogue and petty snobbery and Machiavellian backstabbing. Marilyn Monroe is in one scene that's funnier than her whole performance in "Some Like it Hot". Everyone's funny.
"Design for Living" (1933), the movie tangentially related to an apparent temporal paradox. I did not like this as much as Sumana did—it feels like all the really good jokes got censored—but it was certainly interesting!
"Unfaithfully Yours" (1948) - This movie has a "Fantasia" gimmick I could do without, but it's very sharp and funny. It perfectly captures the mood when you're angrily playing forward your brilliant handling of some hypothetical confrontation, then it shows the chaos that would ensue if you actually tried to handle the confrontation that way.
"Paper Moon" (1973) - A really funny movie about the Depression, a la "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" Classic setup--con artist gets stuck with custody of a little girl who turns out to also be a gifted con artist--and great performances.
A whole load of silent films from 1912. The museum is doing an annual exhibition of films from 100 years ago. Back when movies were made by the same companies that made the cameras and the film projectors, so there'd be something to film and theaters would have something to show. We saw A Night at the Nickelodeon and Alice Guy Blaché, Queen of Solax together (that's a description of a person, not the name of a movie), and I went to Griffith in Fort Lee on my own. All of them had live old-timey piano accompaniment by Ben Model.
Since these films are all public domain, you can watch them yourself online. For yuks I recommend the comedy of manners "The New York Hat" and the comedy of "throw whatever we can think of into the story" "A Grocery Clerk's Romance". For soul-crushing melodrama, I recommend "The Painted Lady" and "The Land Beyond the Sunset", which starts off as turn-of-the-century social activism and then takes a very dark turn. "Sunset" was made by Thomas Edison's studio as a sort of PSA for the Fresh Air Fund, the charity depicted in the film (which still exists). I'm kind of surprised they approved it.
But the real revelation was Alice Guy Blaché, who brought to American film a fresh sensibility that I really think is mainly due to her being a French woman. For instance, she directed "A Fool and His Money" (I can't find the video online), the first film with an all-black cast. I don't watch a lot of silent film, but when I see black actors in a 1912 film I'm primed to cringe at horrifying racism. But the racism... never really happened. Sure, it was goofy, but it felt like vaudeville, with the actors in control of their performances. Here's some more analysis of the film and the different ways it was marketed, the marketing being a lot more representative of 1912 in my mind than the film itself.
There's also "Algie the Miner", a comedy western in which the titular Algie is the most flamboyantly effeminate man you can imagine. Yes, you're cringing already. I, too, cringed. But... it's not what I expected. Algie's pro-forma advances on the New York society daughter are deflected by her New York society father, so Algie goes west to make his fortune and "prove himself a man." He's entrusted into the care of rough-and-tough miner Jim, who mocks Algie's sissy mannerisms and his tiny pistol (SYMBOLISM)... and then shows him the ropes of mining. They become friends. Algie fends off claim jumpers and helps Jim kick his drinking habit. Over the course of the movie Algie learns to handle a bigger gun (SYMBOLISM), and tones the mincing down a bit, but he's still pretty flaming when he goes back to the big city to "claim his girl", with burly buddy Jim in tow.
I don't know about it. I just don't know. It's not a movie anyone would make today, I wouldn't say it's a "positive" depiction of a gay character, but it's a lot more sophisticated than I was expecting from 1912.
I told Andrew Willett about "Algie the Miner" and he said he'd heard of it. The Internet Archive description says it was mentioned in The Celluloid Closet, and Andrew happens to own Vito Russo's 1981 book The Celluloid Closet, so I went through it looking to see what the expert opinion was, but there was no Algie, and "Algie" didn't really fit the paradigm of the other silent films mentioned in the book (which, again, were a lot more representative of what I was expecting from the 1910s and 1920s). Well, it turns out The Celluloid Closet was made into a documentary in 1995, and that's the one with Algie in it. So I still don't know. I'd like to know what other people think.
Finally, there's "The Making of an American Citizen" (I could only find the first part of the movie online, but you get the idea), a heavy-handed film which informs new immigrants that just because your wife's not allowed to vote, that doesn't mean you can beat her with a stick the way you did in the old country. Over the course of the movie we see the entire spectrum of respectable Yankee manhood--the Wall Street toff, the lower-middle-class landlord, the bewhiskered yeoman farmer--stepping in to break up domestic violence with more violence. This is America, pal! [BIFF!] We treat women with respect! [SOCK!] This one's for Elizabeth Cady Stanton! [POW!] Again, it's not the way you'd depict the promise of American freedom today, but its heart is in the right place? Am I crazy here? Don't these sound like movies only an American immigrant woman would make in 1912?
"The Birds" (1963) - I got a very strong vibe from this one of "I'm Alfred motherfuckin' Hitchcock, I can make you afraid of birds doing nothing." I was not afraid of the birds doing nothing. It does have some great scenes, like the traditional B-movie "convincing the skeptical townfolk" scene, which a) takes place in a great-looking 1960s diner, and in which b) the skeptical townsfolk derail the whole scene with random, pointless side arguments. It also has some really awful scenes, like... well, I can't find a real source for this bit of IMDB trivia, but it seems accurate:
Before filming the final [incredibly stupid] attack scene when Melanie goes upstairs, Tippi Hedren asked Alfred Hitchcock, "Hitch, why would I do this?" Hitchcock's response was, "Because I tell you to."

So, a mixed bag. DID I MENTION RICHARD DEACON IS IN THIS MOVIE? As "Stuffy Guy In Elevator"? Aww yeah.
"Psycho" (1960) - Finally, a movie that has the guts to kill off its main character at the end of the first act! I knew the arc of this movie from its sheer prevalence in popular culture, but I wasn't expecting that. Good stuff. Tragically, this excellent movie contains a pointless afterword with a psychiatrist who talks nonsense under the guise of "explaining" everything. Even Richard Deacon can't save the pointless afterword, mainly because he's not in it.
I was really excited to see that the car-lot scene takes place in Bakersfield, but when I looked up the location it turns out that scene was shot in the vicinity of LA.
Ken (1964) a.k.a "The Sword." I'd like to think I'm open-minded enough to appreciate a movie that presents a point of view I totally disagree with, but "Ken" presented its argument for Japanese feudalism in a really melodramatic way that assumes you're on its side to begin with. It didn't help that this movie was from the same studio as 1965's "Daikaijû Gamera", and featured many similar shots and locations. I kept hoping Gamera would show up and smash everything. Now that's how you speak out against modernization!
Mushuku mono (1964) a.k.a. "Homeless Drifter", from the director of "Ken". A more approachable film for Americans than "Ken", the kind of thing that could become the basis for a western. More approachable, but not better. "Ken" is super annoying but engaging, whereas "Mushuku mono" is a really boring film, until the last thirty minutes, when it uses the plot twist from The Empire Strikes Back. This movie may be the original source of that plot twist. But this movie does the plot twist better than The Empire Strikes Back. Seriously!
Okay, dig this. Luke Skywalker spends the whole movie trying to avenge the death of his father, Anakin Skywalker, at the hands of the evil Darth Vader. He can't touch Darth Vader--Vader is too powerful. But he does find Darth Vader's estranged son, Han Solo. Luke Skywalker hates Han Solo. Luke wants to kill Han Solo because he can't get to the real villain.
But Han manages to convince Luke that Darth Vader, although admittedly a bad guy, might not be the real killer. If they can get to Darth Vader together, they might be able to uncover the truth about Anakin Skywalker's death, and Han Solo might be able to patch things up with his dad.
But when they meet up, Darth Vader is in no mood to talk. There's a big fight in which Darth Vader kills his son, Han Solo. And then we find out that Darth Vader is actually Anakin Skywalker. Luke's father. not Han's, is the villain. Luke's father killed Han's father, not the other way around. All of Luke Skywalker's misplaced hatred for Han Solo comes crashing down on him. And then Luke Skywalker has to kill Darth Vader, his father.
Yeah, the last thirty minutes of this movie is pretty awesome. I can't recommend the whole thing, though.
Ashes and Diamonds (1958) - A nice quiet movie about the pointlessness of war, occasionally bogged down by SYMBOLISM that seems completely random unless you're Polish. The main character in his James Dean jeans and sunglasses and haircut looks like a time traveler among everyone else in WWII period dress.

Update: Gonna post the rest of the movies I see this year here, again in reverse chronological order.

"The Whole Town's Talking" (1935) A nearly-pre-Code screwball comedy directed by John Ford and starring Edward G. Robinson. Stupid title makes this sound like a movie version of a boring Broadway musical, but it brought down the house more than any other movie I've seen at the museum. Robinson plays his typecast "Little Caesar"-type gangster, but also plays a wide-eyed nebbishy clerk who gets into many varieties of trouble due to his resemblance to the aforementioned gangster. These two characters would later be averaged out into Robinson's insurance adjuster character in "Double Indemnity". Sample joke: gangster about to rub someone out reaches for a tommy gun instead of his pistol, saying "It's more humane this way." Co-starring Jean Clark as a brassy dame who puts up with more creeper shit from the nebbishy clerk than you'd see in a movie today, but given that she lies to the cops just for fun, with no apparent consequences, I guess she's got everything under control.
"The Nutty Professor" (1963) Jerry Lewis's cinematic revenge on Dean Martin; the tragic tale of a university that institutes a shortsighted ban on independent research. I was expecting big laughs, and I got medium-sized laughs that petered out after the first reel. Lewis is funny and everyone else is terrible. The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes level of terrible. I don't think it's snobbish to say that Jerry Lewis could have made a much funnier college movie if he'd gone to college himself. I do like that Julius Kelp isn't portrayed as being particularly smart; he's just... nutty.
"All That Heaven Allows" (1955) - Rock Hudson as Manic Pixie Dream Boy. Crushing social satire featuring the sort of WASPy country club party that begs for the Marx Brothers to come in and start busting comedic heads. Jean Wyman takes a more restrained approach to her head-busting, and the film provides some genuine emotional moments, but they're drowned out by cornball melodrama. The happy ending is tacked on, but the depressing ending that precedes it is its own kind of cornball melodrama.
It doesn't help that in this "May-December romance" Rock Hudson appears to be about five years younger than Jane Wyman. (He's actually a whopping eight years younger.) A couple in-jokes about the fact that Hudson was gay got big laughs from the 2012 crowd.
"Fanny and Alexander" (1982) - I wasn't in the mood to watch the entire miniseries in one sitting, so I left after the first episode. That was the one I really wanted to see, anyway--the Christmas party. I'd never seen a Bergman film before, and the prelude fulfilled all the stereotypes, but once the movie actually started I got into the raucousness and the family drama. I will see the other four hours eventually.
"The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey" (2012) - Yes, amazing, a new release that I bought a ticket to (along with my sister and brother-in-law). Apparently people are dissing this movie but I had no problem with any of it except the action sequences were too actiony and the one-liners were dumb (even the ones from the book--they were dumb in the book). The Hobbit was my introduction to fiction, I love it, and I love anything to do with it so long as it's consistent with Tolkien's original worldbuilding. Three 170-minute movies? Make it four! Long dramatizations of Gandalf's investigation of the Necromancer? I've been waiting years for that! Radagast being goofy? Tolerable! I'm the guy whose biggest problem with the "Lord of the Rings" series is the lack of Tom Bombadil. Keep it coming, is what I say.
Oh, the one good joke that wasn't from the book was Gandalf being unable to remember the names of the other two Istari.
La Dolce Vita (1960) - My first Fellini film. I was going to watch "Satyricon" earlier this year, but I misread the starting time and got there an hour late. Sumana has negative tolerance for films in which the unlikeable POV character surrounds themselves with unlikeable secondary characters, and I must admit it rubs off. This film is great when it goes for the gut. The sequence with the kids who saw the Virgin Mary is probably the most horrifying thing I saw in a movie this year. But "La Dolce Vita" spends most of its time showing how trivial trivial things are, and I thought that was dull. Still want to see "Satyricon", though.

Mon Dec 10 2012 10:37 Notes On (My) Fiction: Yesterday I finished a draft of a second story in the universe of "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" (working title: "Grand Theft Carnosaur"). It needs some work, but that's what writing group is for. I'm cautiously optimistic. While working on the story I got a concept for a third story in that universe, so maybe I can make it a trilogy. No, a cycle! A motor-cycle.

My actual point here is that while working on "Carnosaur" I discovered a Tumblr full of fan art for "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs", done for a school project! Most of the story is illustrated: the gun store, the motocross race, the news interview, Cass's accident, the capture, talking with the lawyer and going back to Mars. A "cover" was promised but never posted.

"Dinosaurs" got a lot of links when it was published, but no actual reviews, so I was surprised to find two reviews of "Four Kinds of Cargo". First, from Locus: "A lot of silliness and absurdity that ends surprisingly on a heartwarming note." You could review almost any piece of my fiction as "A lot of silliness and absurdity that ends surprisingly on a ________ note."

Tangent's review is longer, more reserved but overall positive:

“Four Kinds of Cargo” is a science fiction story about science fiction characters basing their lives around a science fiction story and its characters. It’s metafiction in a neat, innocuous disguise... Its major drawback is an unavoidable one – the prose simply isn’t very good. But to succeed as the kind of multi-referential system it sets out to be, I don’t think this story could have been written in any other way. The cleverness of the premise and the recognition of what’s been pulled off both explain (if not demand) and make up for the lacklustre prose. This one made me want to grimace as I started reading it; by the end I wanted to applaud.

I'll take it.

Wed Dec 19 2012 13:05 "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" - Illustrated!: It seems like only a week and a half ago, I told you about my discovery of "Awesome Dinosaurs" fan art. Well, now it turns out the artist, Lisa Imas, turned the story into a (one-off) printed book!

Cover

Lisa sent me some pictures once she was done, and I got permission to host a PDF of the book on the "Awesome Dinosaurs" story page, under the same BY-NC-SA license as the story itself. Check it out--the story is now fully illustrated.

Artist's commentary:

The cover displays the tragedy inherent in how any time we put someone or something on a pedestal we are only yadda yadda it’s dinosaurs on motorcycles, okay.

I especially like this understated piece:

More news of my writing coming soon!

(3) Thu Dec 20 2012 15:40 Year's Best: "Four Kinds of Cargo" will be appearing in the 2013 edition of Prime Books's "The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy". That's me in the same book as Elizabeth Bear, Ursula K. LeGuin, Kelly Link, Robert Charles Wilson, and other luminaries.

Fri Dec 21 2012 09:23 Strange Horizons Reviews "Constellation Games": I've been nervous about this review all week, but it's very positive:

Constellation Games is a very funny book, with an effective sweep into pathos that delivers a powerful message... Like the Ignobel awards, Constellation Games makes you laugh, and then it makes you think.

Definitely the first review to call the naming of the Constellation species "an effective piece of othering".

(6) Fri Dec 21 2012 10:34 RESTful Web APIs: I guess it's time to announce my next book project. Mike Amundsen and I are working on a book for O'Reilly called RESTful Web APIs, a follow-up to 2007's RESTful Web Services. Our deadline is the end of March 2013, and the book should come out a few months later. (Here's Mike's announcement of the project.)

Here's my announcement of RESTful Web Services from about six years ago. You can see how far we've come since then.

In 2008 I came up with the now-famous "maturity heuristic" (aka the "RMM") for quickly judging the quality of an API. If you go back and look at RWS through the lens of the maturity heuristic, you'll see that it spends a lot of time trying to get the reader to grasp the concepts behind Level 1 services: that URLs identify resources, and that resources are the proper targets of HTTP requests. That's because back then, Level 1 was about the best you could expect from a "REST" design.

RWS spends a whole chapter treating Amazon S3 as though it were a great example of RESTful design, because in RMM terms it made it all the way to... Level 2. RWS spends another chapter arguing for the legitimacy of REST against a thriving part of the industry that's content at Level 0.

We don't live in that world anymore. I'd say the modal RMM level of a new "REST" API today is 2. Most of the 2007-era arguments have been rendered irrelevant (SOAP vs. REST, the usefulness of PUT) or been given generally accepted best practices (URL formats). Restful Web Services was the first book-length treatment of REST; there are now over ten books on REST from O'Reilly alone. There are lots of development tools that make it really easy to crank out a Level 2 service.

In short, a lot of gravel- and rock-sized problems have been excavated, revealing two boulder-sized problems. I mentioned these two problems in my QCon talk "How to Follow Instructions" (available as video in hour-long version and in a half-hour condensed version presented at RESTFest; see also my QCon slide deck and speaker notes). Now I'll state them explicitly as the two major problems I want to address with RESTful Web APIs.

Duplication of effort

Here's an article from May on Programmable Web, a great site that tracks the world of public APIs: "53 Microblogging APIs: Twitter, TwitPic and What The Trend". Fifty-three was really the number of organizations publishing microblogging APIs, and some of them are utility APIs rather than "microblogging APIs" per se, but after doing some spot checks I do believe there were approximately fifty-three distinct APIs.

Should there really be fifty-three distinct APIs in this field? What if there were, like, five? We're not talking about something complicated, like insurance policies or regulatory compliance. We're talking about posting a little bit of text to a user account. Can we at least get down to ten?

No, apparently not. Like I said, that number was from May. There are now fifty-seven microblogging APIs. Well, damn. What if we got together and hammered out a standard, interoperable microblogging API? Sounds great, except nobody's interested. Evan Prodromou tried that with OStatus, and nothing came of it. You could use AtomPub as a microblogging API, pretty much unmodified, but nobody seems to want to.

The original RESTful Web Services sets out a design procedure for taking your problem domain and turning it into an API. But there's a big problem with this procedure: it doesn't consider the possibility that fifty-six other people may have already done the work for you.

Back in 2007, that possibility was remote. There was one microblogging API. I had to scrape the barrel pretty thin to find enough quasi-RESTful example APIs to fill Appendix A. Now the big problem is too many APIs. When you design the fifty-eighth microblogging API you're limiting your audience and wasting your users' time.

This is a really huge problem and we won't solve it with a book. But we can point out that it's a problem and take the first step towards mitigation. In RESTful Web APIs we present a new design procedure that focuses on reusing existing designs, coming up with new stuff to fill any gaps, and then publishing the new stuff for the benefit of a) your users and b) API developers who come after you.

Hypermedia

Whatever influence RESTful Web Services has had, it stops dead at RMM level 3, the hypermedia level. In 2012, the modal new "REST" API is at level 2. It has been level 2 for a while, and will continue to be level 2 unless something changes. Most architectures don't support hypermedia very well (or at all), and a lot of developers still don't understand it.

That's understandable. To the programmer brain, hypermedia is weird. When you read RWS it's possible to just skip the parts about hypermedia, and I get the feeling a lot of people did. There's stuff in RWS that is now outdated, and stuff that was useful for dealing with 2007's problems but that I now consider just plain wrong. Most of that stuff has to do with hypermedia.

RESTful Web APIs is tightly focused on hypermedia--you will not be able to skip the "hypermedia parts"--and it deals with 2013's problems. Some specific shortcomings of RWS we'll address:

We as developers have a strong desire to export our server-side object models as APIs. This is the idea behind JAX-RS. It's the idea behind lazr.restful, the framework I developed to make the Launchpad web service. But it's also the idea behind SOAP, and it's how we got fifty-seven microblogging APIs.
This desire isn't technically at odds with the use of hypermedia, but it does tend to use hypermedia only to describe safe state transitions (i.e. to link resources together), and RWS didn't really go further than that.
In 2007 there were no hypermedia formats based on JSON, but JSON-based representations were becoming overwhelmingly popular. RWS does not offer advice for this scenario. Developers either made up their own one-off hypermedia formats (as I did with the Launchpad web service), or, more commonly, ignored the hypermedia constraint. Today JSON has a number of general-purpose hypermedia formats (like Siren, Collection+JSON, and HAL), and we'll cover them in RWA.
In RWS I was very dogmatic about avoiding overloaded POST. I felt strongly about this because I really needed to yank people out of the SOAP-RPC mindset. But I've come to accept that overloaded POST exists for a reason: to convey state transitions that don't map naturally onto one of the other HTTP methods.
These state transitions are legitimate if they are described by hypermedia controls, as they are on the Web. They're not just hacks to get around the fact that HTML can't describe PUT and DELETE methods. Prohibiting overloaded POST in the name of the uniform interface forces designers into complicated workarounds to minimize the difference between their application semantics and the protocol semantics of GET/PUT/POST/DELETE. Those workarounds usually reflect the object model the designers already defined for their CRUD databases. Or, the designers give up, use overloaded POST without using hypermedia to describe the state transitions, and feel guilty about it.
Besides which, forbidding overloaded POST means that you can't use HTML, the world's most popular hypermedia format. That's a big problem.

The title

As I said, this is a brand new book, not a second edition of RESTful Web Services. The only major things we're reusing are the appendices dealing with HTTP headers and response codes. To signify the handoff, we're changing the name.

RESTful Web Services was a great name in 2007, but it's not so good now. See, when SOAP went down, it took the term "Web Service" with it. "Web Service" is now an enterprise software term. Everywhere else it's all "API API API".

As I mentioned last year, this is backwards. The SOAP approach is to make a remote service look like a local library. (This idea is not limited to SOAP, of course.) Whereas the RESTful believe that a remote service should look like the Web. (Whatever that means.)

But I'm not gonna re-litigate that argument. "Web Service" is dead, we're stuck with "API", and the name of the book needs to change. "RESTful Web APIs" is a direct translation of "RESTful Web Services" into 2013-speak. It keeps continuity with the old book, but it's a new title for a new book.

Interested?

If you want to be a beta reader, let me know (via comment or email to leonardr@segfault.org). I'll get in touch with you around the end of March, or possibly earlier. Update: We've got a lot of beta readers and we're no longer accepting applications.

Once in a while I add a section to a chapter called "The Hypermedia Zoo", which takes a not-too-detailed look at a lot of hypermedia-aware data formats to demonstrate their diversity. I'm always on a low-level search for more hypermedia formats, and if you name your favorites in the comments I'll take a look. Don't worry about duplicating my list; I also want to see what springs to mind when you think "hypermedia format".

There's also a shorter section called "The Semantic Zoo" which talks about interesting domain-specific data standards. I'm mostly interested in reusable profiles (the IANA registry of link relations, microformats, schema.org microdata, Dublin Core), but I'm also interested in pointers to standalone data formats like Activity Streams. There's a whole lot of stuff out there and I'm not confident that I've seen even half of it.

(2) Fri Dec 21 2012 17:50 new robotfindskitten!: It's a big day for announcements. There's a new "Mayan Apocalypse" version of robotfindskitten, due largely to to the work of new dev team member Eric S. Raymond.

My major contribution to the release was editorial. I consolidated the list of NKIs with lists produced for other ports (notably Dave Griffith's Frotz port). I removed some stupid fifteen-year-old jokes, and added new stupid jokes. The end result is that this version of rfk ships with 701 high-quality NKIs, versus about 400 NKIs of wildly varying quality.