URL Dualism
Explore the concept of URL dualism to understand how URLs serve both as identifiers and resolvable resources. Discover how this duality supports system flexibility by enabling multiple databases, caching strategies, and integration with external services. Learn practical ways to break dependencies and improve information architecture in distributed software environments.
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Duality in URL
We can use quotation marks when we want to talk about a word, rather than using the word itself. For example, we can say the word “verbose” means “using too many words.” It’s a bit like the difference between a pointer and a value; we understand that the pointer stands in as a way to refer to the value.
URLs have the same duality. A URL is a reference to a representation of a value. We can exchange the URL for that representation by resolving it, just like dereferencing the point. Like a pointer, we can also pass the URL around as an identifier. A program may receive a URL, store it as a text string, and pass it along without ever attempting to resolve it. Or our program might store the URL as ...