Twitter upon first glance, is daft. If you were to click on that link right now you would see what appears to be disjoint messages from everyone answering the question "what are you doing right now?". If you are like me, that is probably the most inane thing EVAR, and you'll close that tab and be done with it. My god! It's worse then blogging! That being said, visiting the twitter main page is hardly a reasonable introduction to twitter at all.

In fact, I would say the best way to get introduced to twitter is to ignore the front page and join. Assuming you are one of my friends, add me and then you'll start seeing what it is all about. What everyone is doing is so absolutely unimportant to my own life that I just don't care. However, what my friend are doing can have some really serious impact to inspire, motivate and connect. Here are a few examples:

• mux twitters constantly about the time he spends in the studio, consequently I am sticking to my at-least an hour a week personal promise of studio time (but I've really spent 3 or 4) This is really quite a feat given how little time I have been in the studio before then.
• I've twittered about a track that I am listening to obsessively, which prompted Stormchild to go download and listen, and we've both been tarding over it ever sense.
• It's become a J-Pop support group between people who's identity will be protected.
• General questions can be posted via twitters, and answered in a matter of hours

Essentially Twitter is like broadcast IM. There have been plenty of times that I have wanted to broadcast something to my friends, but didn't feel it is worthwhile to actually bug someone with a message; in this cause I would just twitter it up.

but not only that, it tends to tighten ones social circle. I feel that I am getting tighter with my twitter friends, by virtue of this alternate communication channel.

The important thing about twitter isn't "What are you doing?" but rather, "What do you think is important about what you are doing?" I don't twitter that I am on the bus. I twitter about what I think is important, like The Key to a good morning routine or when discovering/creating A new turn of phrase. I think that is something special, these glimpses into what people feel is important enough in their daily lives.

All this being said, I am very glad that I got into the Status Message thing through twitter (and with the cool twitter group that I have) instead of through Facebook.

On top of it all, Twitter is RESTful. REST is cool.

I'm very pleased to announce that Meditation 0.5.1 is out, the PHP5 REST API Framework. There was a 0.5 release, but I found some bad bugs that needed fixing.

Download the Latest Version
View the Documentation

The new features are:

1. Fixed Naming inconsistencies. Files containing classes are now uppercased
2. Updated in-class documentation for Lily and Lotus
3. Added build files to SVN distribution
4. Implemented the new 3rd party application authentication feature (Gate)
5. added request processors
6. added example processors
7. added an example resource (ExternalAuthExample.php) and its template
8. checked to make sure configuration directives haven't already been defined in config.php.dist
9. removed requestable.php, and replaced it with RequestHandler.php
10. Fixed a bug in lotus where the session id was always passed, even to external sites

In this list, the "3rd party application authentication feature" is just glazed right over. In a nutshell though this lets other people create applications like flickrToys to your flickr, that is, your REST API. Gate, this authentication mechanism, lets the programmer easily authenticate 3rd parties who want to use the REST API provided. This authentication is provided on both an application, and on a user level. What this means is that you can not only allow 3rd party applications to communicate with your API, you can also let users of your application allow a 3rd party application to communicate with your API, on the users behalf.

Another big feature is the addition of RequestProcessors. These are executed before the RequestHandler, and are useful for request parameter mangling (altering pathinfo and query strings), authentication (Gate uses RequestProcessor), etc. They really are quite flexible.

Finally, I've been writing documentation like a madman. I still need to write more documentation on Object Oriented meditation, so watch out for that.

Just a quick note whilst I am mumbling about REST.

It appears that PUT and DELETE methods inside of a form are not supported by most browsers out there. Which makes sense, because the html specification says that the method should only be GET or POST.

So when building your RESTful application, you're stuck either using POST for everything (which isn't really that RESTful) or AJAX, because XmlHttpRequest does handle PUT and DELETE.

Last night I was able to put the finishing touches on Meditation, the PHP REST API Framework. This is a simple set of 2 classes to facilitate the building of RESTful PHP applications.

As I mentioned in a previous entry "The Third Taste... Not So much..", PHPs handling of the PUT and DELETE methods are lacking. This is where Meditation comes in.

With Meditation, you get an instance of the Lotus singleton, which is an object-wraper around the request. You give it some callbacks that handle the methods you need, and it handles most of the low-level grunt work for you. The documentation is all available on my wiki right here, and the Alpha release is available here.

There is another singleton, Lily, which is an object-wrapper around the response. Currently it just handles responding to Client errors (HTTP 4xx messages) and Server errors (HTTP 5xx message), but in the future, it will also handle 2xx and 3xx messages as well.

I'm eating my own dogfood and using this in my funky Tile Editor.

Update: meditation is now up to version 0.5.1. Please check the trackbacks to this entry for future versions.