RestMS is growing and has a new home on www.restms.org plus its own mailing list.
It's easy to remember when the first running RestMS code hit the streets - on 25 December 2008 - since here at iMatix we pronounce it to rhyme with "Xmas". Now a few months later, Thilo Fromm has started on a Python/Django server and started to contribute ideas to the spec, such as a pipe that would pump its messages back into some feed.
RestMS is splitting off from AMQP, which starts to become a special use case. Thilo's server will be stand-alone and eventually Zyre will also be.
So, we've moved RestMS off the wiki.amqp.org site where it was incubated. We based wiki.amqp.org on frameworks built by the Digital Standards Organization and first tested in anger - well, mild pique perhaps - to develop microspecifications around AMQP: CML, DMP, and then RestMS.
At the heart of this framework is Digistan's COSS, the Consensus-Oriented Specification System, with its controversial but satisfyingly evil branch-sharealike-and-merge answer to resolving the conflicts which always emerge in such processes. The good folk at Digistan have built a new template site for specification projects like RestMS. A few clicks (an hour or so) and I was able to clone this template site into a new www.restms.org.
If this all sounds suspiciously easy, it's because Digistan uses Wikidot.com, like this blog, and Wikidot.com is one of those magical tools that turn ordinary people into semi-gods.
The new restms.org site is set up to host not a single, but a collection of specifications, each with authors, contributors, critics. Of course the work will mostly be done by a few individuals, as it always is. But the important thing is that anyone, wanting to get involved, can. There are no barriers except the ability to contribute (which may be limited by one's professional freedom).
As we go through the next round of RestMS drafting it'll become clearer why we need a collection of specs, rather than one document. The main reasons are to split stable designs from experimental work, to give people easy space into which to contribute new ideas.
