Spaces on a shoestring

What if an application used an irc channel as a (Java)Spaces implementation mechanism? That would be cool. Persistence could be manged by an IRC bot running on the server (or, indeed, any node) that logged all the messages.

Encryption? Any standard mechanism (RSA, blowfish etc) plus base64 encoding should take care of that.

Wonder if anyone’s implemented this idea yet?

SOAP vs REST

I think Amazon said it best (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/sdk/main.html?p=APIReference/RESTRequestsArticle):

REST allows you to make calls to AWS by passing parameter keys and values in a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). AWS returns its response in XML (Extensible Markup Language) format. You can experiment with AWS requests and responses using nothing more than a Web browser that is capable of displaying XML documents. Simply enter the REST URL into the browser’s address bar, and the browser displays the raw XML response.

Can you test your SOAP service with nothing more than a web browser?