Structured Methods

Do you have an hour and want to learn about REST? Take a look at the
above referenced slides, while listening to this great episode (No. 98) of the
stellar “Software Engineering Radio”.
This is well-worth your time.

The Atom Publishing Protocol ([AtomPub]) provides a simple, extensible mechanism for the creation of Web Resources. The SWORD profile builds upon AtomPub, providing a set of extensions and constraint relaxations and enforcements of use when:
* Clients wish to create resources by sending compound resources, such as archive files (tar, zip).
* Both non-interactive and 3rd party mediated operation are required.
* Workflows may or may not include manual stages before deposited resources become available as web resources.
The SWORD profile relaxes a number of constraints of AtomPub, and adds a number of elements. It avoids overloading the elements of or changing the semantics of AtomPub. Consequently, SWORD compliance does not preclude AtomPub compliance; implementers wishing to support additional elements of AtomPub, such as update (PUT), DELETE, categories or POSTing [Atom] documents are free to do so.

The GNU General Public License (or GPL) is the most popular Free Software license. It’s a reciprocal or “copyleft” license in that in order to be allowed the right to redistribute the software (normally forbidden under copyright law) the distributor has to agree to make the source code available to the recipient under exactly the same terms. In other words, share and share alike. The main point of the GPL license is it is impossible to use it to create proprietary software. It’s deliberately designed that way by a man who views proprietary software as immoral. The Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD license, is a much simpler document. Essentially it allows anyone to use the code without restriction, so long as the copyright notice and disclaimers of warranty are preserved. The main difference between the two is that BSD licensed code is freely used in proprietary software.