In September of 2004 I started work at Socialtext and tried to spread the church of purple, but it didn't take: Too weird, too much work for people.
And then I saw TiddlyWiki, with tiddlers, and started stealing some ideas from there, primarily whole page transclusion: Hacking granularity into Socialtext by being able to assemble complex pages from smaller, simpler parts that could be reused in multiple places.
In summer of 2006 we started on what we called the REST API for Socialtext. It would not have had the Roy Fielding stamp of approval, so it would be better to call it the HTTP API for Socialtext, but we called it REST to highlight that it wasn't SOAP, the other API we had just finished, created to interoperate with Sharepoint and, ew, ick.
We designed the HTTP API with a few very important things in mind:
- We wanted to be sure that it imposed no constraints on what people what might do with it.
- We knew that meant the API itself should be very constrained, very general.
- Therefore it should be of, about and for the web.
Four years later somebody on twitter said:
The first client of the HTTP API was TiddlyWiki with which a product called Socialtext Unplugged was created. This allowed a Socialtext wiki to "fill" a TiddlyWiki and be taken offline, edited, and have changes sync back. The API and TiddlyWiki's adaptor mechanism mutually informed one another's development. Jeremy and I got to know one another.