

Announcing "ROCA"

Stefan Tilkov,

In the past few days, we finally managed to write down a few ideas on Web frontend design, basically a set of rules to apply if the goal is to come up with a Web app that is actually on the Web as opposed to be tunnelled through the Web. We tried to come up with a catchy name, and finally arrived at “ROCA”, a conveniently pronouncable acronym for “Resource-oriented client architecture”.

I am aware that for many folks, specifically those who are interested in REST and thus likely to read this, a common reaction might be “Duh”. And one of the main things I’d like to stress is that we have not invented a single thing, but rather collected a certain set of rules that we found many people liked, but couldn’t name.

Since we started discussing this, we’ve found strong support, as well as violent opposition. Which is exactly what we were looking for, because in only very very few cases, people didn’t understand what we described, and that’s the whole point of the effort: Give a name to a certain cohesive set of practices so that they may used as a reference both when you agree with them, want to build a system that adheres to them or criticize them because you disagree.

I’m looking forward to comments over at the discussion page. If you believe we should make changes, please fork the GitHub repo and create a pull request.