Tip of the Iceberg

Category poll
Chris Toohey (or, as I affectionately call him, "Winnie the Tooh") and I have long dreamed of creating true REST API's for Domino applications. In fact, some of you may remember that Yellowcast was originally created to establish an auditory documentary of our explorations in that area. And yes, to the many who have asked us (and even publicly called us out for not yet doing so), some new episodes are on the drawing board... we just haven't had time yet to record them. Some of you may also remember that, at the time, we collided at full speed with some inherent limitations in the Domino platform that kept us from implementing a true REST architecture - at least, not without some gruesome hacks that we didn't quite have the stomach for. Well, as it turns out, this is one of many functional concepts that are just remarkably simple to implement in an XPage.

Chris has already been posting some intriguing stuff about how this is done, but one facet of it that I was playing with a while back is how to roll your own authentication for such an API, since standard Domino authentication unfortunately does not lend itself well to the sort of viral, consumer-platform-agnostic adoption services like Twitter currently enjoy. While the actual implementation of this is still dead simple, the underlying techniques used by the approach I settled upon are rather unconventional compared to traditional Domino development techniques. As such, in attempting to write up an explanation of the approach, I've found myself going into much more meticulous detail than is customary for this blog. In fact, when it's finished, it's unlikely the content would fit safely within the limits of NSF summary data. In other words, I can't just plop it into a single blog post.

So here are a few options I've considered, and I'd like your feedback on which you'd prefer (and feel free to suggest an alternative I haven't listed):

• A series of blog posts, each functioning as a miniature "chapter" in a larger saga - the advantage of this is that you'd get a little bit at a time, and of course the suspense surrounding when the next chapter will be available (kidding, I know none of you are losing sleep over when I'm going to get around to blogging again). The disadvantage, of course, is that I might tease you with the first couple chapters, then leave you hanging because something shiny caught my eye and distracted me from finishing what I started.
• A VIEW article (assuming it becomes something they'd want to publish) - the advantage of this is that the content is guaranteed to be more polished, since they don't publish anything until it meets their high standards for technical content. The obvious disadvantage is that it wouldn't be freely available; you'd need to be a subscriber to read it... though, as I've mentioned before, their content is well worth the subscription price.
• One big PDF - just as with a VIEW article, you wouldn't see any of it until it's all done, but when it is, it'll be in a single, reasonably coherent form. And, of course, I could always post it in various stages of draft, so you could follow along as the overall content takes shape.

So there you have it. Do you see an option you prefer, or do you have other suggestions?