Interesting trend emerging: clients (i.e., web browsers) hitting resources directly. Some examples I’ve seen recently:
- CouchDB speaks javascript/json natively, so it’s trivial (and encouraged) to access the database directly from the browser.
- Jester is a javascript library for fetching ActiveResource-style xml record from a Rails app, putting 100% of the display logic into the client.
- Strophe is a javascript XMPP library. Chat programs in the browser can connect directly to a Jabber server, and skip talking to any HTTP server altogether.