Printing RFCs

I am on the Linux/Ubuntu platform. 'gedit', 'firefox' (both *.txt and *.html formats) wouldn't print RFCs in a way that put a page of contents on a page of print.

RFCs are set up for dot matrix printer days.

BUT, OpenOffice 'Writer' (and probably Microsoft Word) respect the embedded ASCII page separator and properly print the document. It even worked out of the box with the default (or that chosen for *.txt formats) font type and size.

So if you need a few pages out of an RFC:
Open it in the *.txt format from the IETF website,
Save it to the file system,
Open it in OpenOffice Writer
Open 'Print Preview' and explore to find the pages you want,
Go back to 'Print', slect the pages you want,
Print them!

Testing Symfony Apps With PHPUnit

[Alt-Title: Or It's NEVER as Easy As the Tutorials Show]

Symfony development cycle is done on a local machine, (probably many other frameworks also). This saves the long upload times, and allows a programmer/developer to work on a project even while on vacation without Internet . . . . uh, right.) Is is much faster. Another major benefit is not interfering with the production site . . . at all, even in subdomain, or a separate database.

Part of that cycle is to drop and recreate the database for every little change, especially when doing testing. It means a clean slate, no interference between tests.

Symfony2 will be swtiching from its own home brewed 'lime' testing framework to PHPUnit according to Dustin Whittle as of a presentation by him at a PHP Meetup 1 week ago. They WILL be extending it to recover what they will lose from lime, gaining both from in house efforts and the community efforts @ the PHP Unit group.

So even though I'm currently using Symfony 1.4.4, I thought I would start my transition to Doctrine 2 by using PHP Unit on my current project (the subject of this blog). Both Symfony 1.4.1 and PHP Unit are current products, and I thought that I wouldn't have to deal with 'first adopter' problems. Sigh, wishful thinking.

Let me preface by saying that I prefer and use Postgresql for the database. It may not have anything to do with the lesson learned and described here, but then maybe it does. I'll leave it for the audience to comment upon using their experiences.

So, running Ubuntu, Apache, Postgres, PHP, Symfony, and Doctrine, I built a moderately complex ERD/Schema. The first lesson?

(LESSON-1)
ALWAYS use substitute, BIG INT, primary keys. Why?

• They are small compared to strings.
• If the data changes, the indexes don't have to, (data as primary keys forces the database to recalculate indexes if the data changes.)
• Symfony 1.x.x, and even Symfony 2/Doctrine 2 (according to a page at http://www.doctrine-project.com/ that I read) will not yet support a sequence with a muliti column, composite key. Just using a muliti column key would probably make the Doctrine ORM work harder and give it more chances to not do exactly what you had in mind
  

Using a substitute primary key, means that uniqueness on the DATA column potentially used as a primary key must then be enforced using an additional index on the/those column/s. So maybe the extra writing to the index still goes on. My bad. If you really want to learn about the 'Big Fight' surrounding substitute integer primary keys, use your favorite search engine to read about it. But it REALLY is better with web frameworks, trust me.

Having got past the Symfony/Doctrine framework not being able to create a model on composite keys involving a sequence, I have made great progress. In fact, I'm to the testing point on the main datagram/ERD/Schema in relationship to user input, searching, and output pages. Yehaww.

So, back to PHP Unit/Symfony. I set up an inheriting class of the main PHP Unit class 'PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase'. All methods that begin with 'test...' are executed when the class is executed by a CLI executable of PHPUnit, or when the execute() method of the class is called. They SEEM to be in the order that they are defined in the class, but I've only written two methods so far.

[LESSON-2]
Use exception test everywhere in PHPUnit derived class while doing PHPUnit/Symfony testing.
[LESSON-3]
Build fixtures (preset conditions) and tests for them INCREMENTALLY.

One reason is, the line numbers that PHPUnit feeds forward to the screen with errors is the line IT called, not where the error is. And the error stack is not that accurate either. And incremental building/testing (should be done together) lets you know, MOST of the time, where the error is.

Other reasons, inline echos come out of PHPUnit out of order from its message and its output. PHPUnit also seems to NOT output PHP errors, or stop at 'exit()', but to keep going past them. So it's better to build small pieces, build small steps,blah blah.

Did I do that at first? NO! That's why I can tell you it's easier doing so now :-)

NOW . . . The main lesson in this post.

[LESSON-4]
It's *NOT* a good idea to drop the database for every test. Reasons?

• It SEEMS as if the make a database code in Postgres or Doctrine returns before it's actually done. In fact, as I read this, I seem to remember having read somewhere that dropping/creating the database is NOT transactionable. I can tell you from personal experience, that is SEEEEEEMS that way for me. I would get errors about columns not existing, or creating tables would fail, or foreign key violations, or other errors that didn't make sense. The datasets I'm using are tiny, and I KNOW that there's no chance of foreign key violations, and which columns exist or don't.
• It takes a LONG time to drop a database and recreate one. Something like 7 seconds on my machine at home. If I am running 25-100 fixtures with several assertions each, that would be a long time, counting the data tests that will happen when the tests get much larger towards the end.
• It takes a long time to ADD test data if it's any size at all, but this also affects my eventual solution - partially.

What do do otherwise? Delete the data in the tables, reset sequences/autoincrementing columns, reload data. The database stay sin existence. Several things have to be taken into account though.

Drop the tables in the order that it does not cause any foreign key violations, from lowest 'grandchild' table to the highest parent. IF your data is too complex for that, drop all the constraints, then recreate them before repopulating the test data. If you have large datasets, and your database supports it, TRUNCATE the tables. It essentially just erases the contents of the database files but without deleting the files. Finally, if your datasets are large, or you've run many tests on the database already, force your database to scan the tables and consolidate the records to the top of the table files in a smaller file. Different DBs call it different things. If you do TRUNCATE, you may not need to do the scan.

What did I try with Symfony/Doctrine/PHPUnit *BEFORE* resorting to doing something more conventinal/pre framework era-like:

1/ Before each PHPUnit test, I ran the command line reset of the project using one of PHP's host command line invocation functions, exec(). I did it like this:

Executing it from outside of PHP while inside of the Program.

  //the following was an attempt to let Postgres drop a database.

 // Postgres will not do so while there are connections to a database.
     Doctrine_Manager::getInstance()->getCurrentConnection()->close();

exec('./symfony doctrine:build --all --and-load --no-confirmation');

This drops the database, recreates it, recreates the tables, then the constraints, then loads the data, and does not ask for confirmtatio of anything. Using that on the command line (not from within a program) is the normal command line, user land approach. This did NOT avoid any of the timing issues ,and always resulted with strange errors.

1/ Before each PHPUnit test, I ran the Symfony task from WITHIN symfony by doing this:

using a Task from inside of symfony:

  $optionsArray=array();

$argumentsArray=array();

$optionsArray[]="--all";

$optionsArray[]="--and-load";

$optionsArray[]="--no-confirmation";

$task = new sfDoctrineBuildTask($configuration->getEventDispatcher(),

new sfFormatter());

$task->run($argumentsArray, $optionsArray);

This had slightly different errors . . . . sometimes.

SOOOOOOOooooooo, since I've been in construction, I less frequently site there and try and figure out what the right thing is supposed to do, or what the designers were really trying to get us to do. I JUST GET IT WORKING. I knew that doing it the straight SQL way would work, so that's what I did.

[LESSON-5]Doctrine's 'rawSqlblah' functions aren't really 'raw' or that transparent.

BUT, I did find a post that showed how to do it, symfony framework forum: General discussion => [HOWTO] True RAW SQL in Doctrine. The thing is to avoid mixing PDO, or even lower level code withi Symfony/Docrine code because you can REALLY screw up the multi level transaction code inside of Doctrine. And, it STILL is simpler, even using raw SQL vs ORM, to use the Doctrine ORM for the connection. Your code has to be database specific in some cases, though. Here's how to do it for Postgres:

//multiple statements not possible in prepared queries (used by default)

$sql=array();

// removes every record,if the constraints allow

$sql[]="delete from table_one";

//sets it back to starting value, usually 1.

$sql[]="alter sequence table_one_id_seq restart";

// removes every record,if the constraints allow

$sql[]="delete from table_two";

//sets it back to starting value, usually 1.

$sql[]="alter sequence table_two_id_seq restart";

$doctrine = Doctrine_Manager::getInstance()->getCurrentConnection()->getDbh();

foreach( $sql as $do ){
$doctrine->query($do);
}

//Still possible, and EASIER to load the (default) fixture file using external commands:

//Symfony command line commands must always be done from project root

chdir(sfConfig::get('sf_root_dir'));
exec('./symfony doctrine:data-load');

So, this post talked about 5 lessons about using Symfony with PHPUnit that YOU don't have to learn the hard way if you don't want to:

[Alt-Title: Or It's NEVER as Easy As the Tutorials Show]
(LESSON-1)
ALWAYS use substitute, BIG INT, primary keys. Why?
[LESSON-2]
Use exception test everywhere in PHPUnit derived class while doing PHPUnit/Symfony testing.
[LESSON-3]
Build fixtures (preset conditions) and tests for them INCREMENTALLY.
[LESSON-4]
It's *NOT* a good idea to drop the database for every test.
[LESSON-5]
Doctrine's 'rawSqlblah' functions aren't really 'raw' or that transparent. See this link about the subject and better way to do it: symfony framework forum: General discussion => [HOWTO] True RAW SQL in Doctrine


Site references:
http://www.phpunit.de/
http://www.symfony-project.com/
http://www.doctrine-project.com/

[NOTES]
1/ So why was I trying to use a sequence/autoincrementing column in combination with the primary key columns? There were/are 8 integer columns that are fed from 4 other tables that need to be unique. To use THOSE as the foreign keys in the the table that is a child of that table, I really needed to make those have mulitple occurrences in that child table. BUT I wanted to be able to search for it easier and have LOTS easier database code to write, especially if I eventually go to C++ for somethings for speed. (Please, it does happen :-) There's more to it that that, proprietary to the site, that I can't divulge.

SUCCESS at doing Bulk operations in Symfony

Well, after fighting my way through many pages, and many object methods that SEEMED like they would give me the opportunity to enclose a bulk load operation in a transaction, I finally found out how to do it.

DON'T get the PDO object from the Doctrine Library. Using it directly prevents Doctrine's 'Transaction' tree from keeping track of things. The PDO object might also not be connected yet depending on your context.

A good site for better laid out, and maybe better filled out documetation on Doctrine is: http://www.tig12.net/downloads/apidocs/symfony/lib/plugins/sfDoctrinePlugin/lib/vendor/doctrine/Doctrine/Doctrine_Manager.class.html#det_methods_connection

(That's a specific link to a specific item. I'll leave it as a reader's exercise to find their way to the home page of the site ;-) )

Anyway, reading through the documentation on that site, and examples of transactions for Symfony or Doctrine, I FINALLY found the crucial details.

A/ Use an instance of Doctrine_Connection to handle transactions external to the normal ORM statements that might be done for bulk loading.

B/ HOW TO GET THAT Doctrine_Connection instance while in a connected state.

And, drum roll please,this is how you do it:

$connection=Doctrine_Manager::connection(); // Doctrine_Manager is static.
//read link above to get info on how it automatically connects

$connection->beginTransaction();

//do bulk load stuff here, orrrrrrrrr
//roll your own save around all the elements of a complex schema save.
//For example.
//Books<->Authors database
//Authors can have multiple books
//Books can have multiple authors
//Three tables/objects in database
//Books, BookAuthors, Authors.
//To get them to save all at one

$book=new Book();
$book['author']='george';
$book['author']='dude';
$book->save();

//$book now has two authors.
//Internal code to books (and/or authors) that you have to write collects all the
//authors for books, or books for authors, and saves to all three tables, in between
// 'beginTransaction()' like above, and a 'commitTransaction()', like below.

$connection->beginTransaction();

Simplistic, and effective, but not complete. To do it right, you would put transaction inside of Book->save() method inside a try/catch block to catch database exceptions. See http://www.php.net/try and read all relevant links for 'catch', 'Exception', 'throw'

How this helps you.

EXTRA TIP.

Use arrays for data input and output as much as possible to save overhead

Set all variables to NULL at end of loops to help memory management and garbage collection in PHP.

Using the database in Tasks in Symfony

The latest Symfony (1.4.1 as of 2010-06-13, using doctrine 1.2) has a pretty good task skeleton generator.

But first, the definition of a task. For Symfony, a task is something that can be executed using PHP CLI (Command Line Interpreter). This is also something that can be executed from a cron script (a good thing to know).

The key part is, that the skeleton Symfony creates uses the whole Symfony environment, including the Doctrine ORM, filters, all sorts of things. However, the skeleton, like a LOT of things in Symfony, is not well documented. Or, it's documented in only a tutorial. Hence, this blog article on the database connection.

Here is the code that my use of symfony generated:

The command line issued while in the project directory
~$ ./symfony generate:task taskman
>> task Creating "/home/project_dir/lib/ta...taskmanTask.class.php" task file
~$

The resultant file in /home/project_dir/lib/task/taskmanTask.php
<?php

class taskmanTask extends sfBaseTask
{
protected function configure()
{
// // add your own arguments here
// $this->addArguments(array(
// new sfCommandArgument('my_arg', sfCommandArgument::REQUIRED, 'My argument'),
// ));

$this->addOptions(array(
new sfCommandOption('application', null, sfCommandOption::PARAMETER_REQUIRED, 'The application name'),
new sfCommandOption('env', null, sfCommandOption::PARAMETER_REQUIRED, 'The environment', 'dev'),
new sfCommandOption('connection', null, sfCommandOption::PARAMETER_REQUIRED, 'The connection name', 'doctrine'),
// add your own options here
));

$this->namespace = '';
$this->name = 'taskman';
$this->briefDescription = '';
$this->detailedDescription = <<<EOF
The [taskman|INFO] task does things.
Call it with:

[php symfony taskman|INFO]
EOF;
}

protected function execute($arguments = array(), $options = array())
{
// initialize the database connection
$databaseManager = new sfDatabaseManager($this->configuration);
$connection = $databaseManager->getDatabase($options['connection'])->getConnection();

// add your code here
}
}
Notice these excerpted lines:
// initialize the database connection
$databaseManager = new sfDatabaseManager($this->configuration);
$connection = $databaseManager->getDatabase($options['connection'])->getConnection();

The big deal is that it happens in the context of the task class, inheriting the BaseTask class. So that's where the '$this->configuration' argument comes from. This configuration contains the database connection details for /home/project_dir/config/databases.yml, among other things.

So the variable $databaseManager, and instance of sfDatabaseManager, already has set up in it all your connections defined in databases.yml. 'You should know that', right? ;-) You should also know how the dbases in your databases are named, right? Yeah, I thought not.

It's not really apparent from the code generated byt $options['connection'] is how you feed in the name of the database connection as defined in databases.yml. Here is my simple,for now, databases.yml (mangled to remove important details):

# You can find more information about this file on the symfony website:
# http://www.symfony-project.org/reference/1_4/en/07-Databases

all:
doctrine:
class: sfDoctrineDatabase
param:
dsn: pgsql:host=localhost;dbname=dbname
username: semi_administrative_name
password: separate_password_for_each_connection_username

I don't remember how I generated this yml file, I think it was automatic as a Doctrine one upon project generation. Anyway, 'doctrine' is the name of the connection.

There are two ways you could feed this into the statement:
'WAY ONE'
$connection = $databaseManager->getDatabase('doctrine')->getConnection();

'WAY TWO'
feed the name 'doctrine' to the task on the command line as an option, like:
{from your project directory}
./symfony namespace:taskmanTask.php --connection=doctrine
$connection = $databaseManager->getDatabase($options['connection'])->getConnection();


Now, three other things to consider to round out using the databases in Symfony tasks:

A/ You can investigate using sfOrmTask as the base class for your task, like:

class taskmanTask extends sfDoctrineTask
vs
class taskmanTask extends sfBaseTask
Some hints on how that might be useful are here:
http://librosweb.es/symfony_1_2_en/capitulo16/using_symfony_outside_of_a_web_context.html

B/ You need to declare a namespace inside of the generated task file. Symfony will automatically scan all tasks and cache them and therefore will know the namespace declared inside the file. For example:

change:
$this->namespace = '';
to:
$this->namespace = 'cron'; // I use this for my cron running scripts

C/ I forgot, what it was, if I remember, I'll edit this.

Anyway, passing this, probably incomplete, info on using databases in tasks.

PS SOMEDAY I HAVE TO LEARN HOW TO KEEP INDENTED LINES IN CODE HERE. The .yml file has various indentions. See your own file.

Obivously, folks, I'm not a great schmoozer and publicist for myself. SOME of that is going to change - It's a necessary business skill.

Highlights of my absence:

1/ Currently laid off, between jobs, etc. Getting in Better Shape, getting allthe 'hanging over my head things I need to do someday' done.

2/ Some insights into using cron.
A/ On Ubuntu, the cron scripts for individual users are stored in a different place from where all the web articles said they were. Ubuntu does this often, but often better than other distributions, IMHO.

The location is: /var/spool/cron/crontabs/$SYSTEM_USER_NAME

B/ For something to happen at a repeating schedule, use */num. I saw this listed as '0/num' in several places, which is different. THAT starts at the 0 value of the time measure (minute/hour/day/month/year) and then every 'num' units past that. '*/num' starts at the NEXT evenly divisible by NUM unit. Examples:

EVERY MINUTE ----------------------------------
# m h dom mon dow command
0/1 * * * * echo "every single minute" >> $HOME/cron.log

Will create (if necessary) append (if file exists) the phrase 'every single minute' from the first time it is called by the cron daemon.

EVERY MINUTE AFTER XX:XX:00
# m h dom mon dow command
0/1 * * * * echo "every minute after the top of the next hour and then forever" >> $HOME/cron.log

Will create (if necessary) append (if file exists) the phrase 'every minute after the next top of the next hour and then forever' by the cron daemon.

GREAT service to ease introducing and monetizing an API

I highly recommend the following company's product and concept.

http://www.webservius.com/

It handles the APP_id sign up, authentication, bandwidth throttling, and many other issuses. They said that they use cloud servers so they shouldn't provide much dealy between your users and your api.

There's a free version for you and your clients.

Tell them that I sent you? I get nothing but a warm fuzzy feeling when he calls me thanking me.

Success in API development and concepts learned

Our company had a succesful introduction of our API at a 'Hackathon' in Mountain View, CA yesterday. Lot's of great ideas are brewing at the 'Hacker Dojo'. Problems that we have solved, or found solutions for are:

1/ How to indicate the format of a feed/api in a REST URL. The old standard of putting the file type extension at the end seems to be universal and easiest to implement. Examples: (format can be 'json','xml','txt','html','pdf',etc)

create new resource in collection called 'resource_name'
POST http://sub.domain.tld/resource_name.format
POST http://api.yahoo.com/calendar.json (made this up)
(returns 'resource_id')

get resource in collection called 'resource_name'
GET http://sub.domain.tld/resource_name/resource_id.format
GET http://api.yahoo.com/calendar/a8e5b892c0024ead.json (made this up)

get resources in collection called 'resource_name'
GET http://sub.domain.tld/resource_name.format?query_string
GET http://api.yahoo.com/calendar.json?search_text=danc&from_date=2010-03-01&to_date=2010-03-07 (made this up)

2/ It's an INSANE consumer of memory and speed to format outgoing JSON/XML/etc for human readability. Rely on the user's viewing software application for that. DON'T format your output data for human readability. (On a shared hosting account, for 250 records returned in JSON, it would time out @ 30 seconds while formatted while returning nothing. Taking the formatting out the started the 'transferring data from site-name' message after 1 second, and it was basically my wireless holding up that transfer which took 5 seconds for 500kbytes. There may also have been some time for the browser to render the JSON using the 'JSONView' plugin, nicely formatting it :-)

There are some other things we have learned lately. I will post them over time.

All the best out there.

Research and Experience gained

It's been a long time, my poor little blog (and it's followers(s)). A lot of my work is now going to be company confidential. But I will share what I have figured out . . . if it's already out on the web somewhere.

1) Most Server site software development frameworks now use URL rewriting.URL rewrite can 'scrape' variable/value pairs out of apparent directories after a site address. For example:

http://www.site.tld/variable-A/value-A/animal-type/dog/

The delimiters can be fairly custom within the allowed URL character set. For example:

http://www.site.tld/variable-A#value-A/animal-type#dog/
http://www.site.tld/variable-A#value-A/animal-type#dog/breeds#poodle;afghan;border-collie/

2) When using a modern software development framwork like Symfony, Ruby on Rails, .Net MVC, and the Java MVC products, one of the VERY FIRST THINGS THAT YOU WANT TO DO between doing all the business modeling, use cases, and other top level software design tasks, and actually coding is to map the resources and modules to URLs. Part of that is deciding what formats to supply upon request and where to signify the format on the URL.


3) If a site is going to use multiple formats, the most common way for that to to the server what format is desired is to use a file extension, but use it ubiquitously.

That means, as normal, if a URL looks like:

http://subdomain.domain.tld/directory/filename.ext

Just change the extension to what is desired, and if the site supports it, grand. Usual suspects are .rss|.xml|.json|.html. The ubiquitous part means NO MATTER WHAT IS THE LAST MAJOR VALUE AT THE END OF THE URL (except for variable/value pairs and query strings), PUT THE '.format' AT THE END OF IT. Examples will show it clearly:

http://subdomain.domain.tld/module-or-resource/action.FORMAT

http://subdomain.domain.tld/fake_directory_name_for_user_readability/module-or-resource/action.FORMAT

http://subdomain.domain.tld/module-or-resource/action.FORMAT/var1#value1/var2#value2/

http://subdomain.domain.tld/fake_directory_name_for_user_readability/module-or-resource/action.FORMAT?not-user-friendly-query-string-value=something&also-serach-engines-dont-catalog-this-full-url=but-we-want-that

http://www.site.tld/resource/action/id.format

http://www.site.tld/products/ship/4d912f22c182293a70e2e7ac3671228dff397a52.FORMAT/carrier#ups/rate#blue/address#123-Mocking-Bird-Lane-Uphigh-CO-80230-USA/currency#usd


The '.format' is between the end of the part of the URL that selects the resource or code and the part of the URL that supplies variables to the code processing the request. (PHP/Symfony, PHP/Drupal, Ruby/Rails, et al. all use this)

This convention/practice was decided upon in my projects after going through the research below. I hope it is as useful to you as it was to me:

=========================================

=================
I looked at the following sites:
Twitter
yahoo
amazon S3
facebook
myspace
linkedin
google.

(EOL = End of the Last listed of Collection, Module, Action ,Or Id)

The methods of specifying the return type of the document were one of three different kinds:

1/ Implied, because only one was available (Amazon S3:json, Linkedin:xml)
2/ Implied but another could be specified BY ADDING ‘.format’ TO THE END OF THE EOL before any query string or friendly URL components at the end of the whole URL (MySpace-xml:add.json)
3/ Implied but another could be specified by a query string paramter (google-atom:‘alt=json’, yahoo-xml:‘output=json’)
4/ Format was required BY ADDING ‘.format’ TO THE END OF THE EOL ((Twitter:add .json|.xml|.rss)

=========================================

API Versions numbers used in URL of the the API for:
Yahoo
MySpace

EXAMMPLES of the way '.format' is added to API URLs:
-------------------------------------------------------
http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/urls
HTML
 GET /people/1
     return the first record in HTML format
 GET /people/1.html
     return the first record in HTML format
XML
 GET /people/1.xml
     return the first record in XML format
JSON
 GET /people/1.json
     return the first record in JSON format

http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/SAKDEV/EntityBroker+RESTful+URL+support

Access to an entity:(MEMBER)

   * http://localhost:8080/direct/webapp-entity/id0
   * http://localhost:8080/direct/webapp-entity/id0.xml
   * http://localhost:8080/direct/webapp-entity/id0.json

Access to an entity space:(COLLECTION)

   * http://localhost:8080/direct/webapp-entity
   * http://localhost:8080/direct/webapp-entity.xml
   * http://localhost:8080/direct/webapp-entity.json

Describing entities: (SELF-DISCOVERY/ERD)
   o http://localhost:8080/direct/describe
   o http://localhost:8080/direct/eval-evaluation/describe
   o http://localhost:8080/direct/webapp-entity/describe
   o http://localhost:8080/direct/webapp-entity/describe.xml

MySpace
EXAMPLE REQUEST:
   * XML: http://api.myspace.com/v1/users/454304609/albums
   * JSON: http://api.myspace.com/v1/users/454304609/albums.json

Twitter
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-Search-API-Method%3A-search
Search(GET)
 o Example: http://search.twitter.com/search.json?callback=foo&q=twitter
            http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?lang=en&q=devo
Statuses/User_timeline

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/12345.xml or http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/bob.json.
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml?user_id=1401881
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=101010
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.rss?page=3
Status Updates (POST)
curl -u user:password -d "status=playing with cURL and the Twitter API" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml


 
Further References
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/12/01/restful-web.html
http://ajaxpatterns.org/RESTful_Service (EXCELLENT)*  Describing entities:
   o http://localhost:8080/direct/describe
   o http://localhost:8080/direct/eval-evaluation/describe
   o http://localhost:8080/direct/webapp-entity/describe
   o http://localhost:8080/direct/webapp-entity/describe.xml