Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs, provides an alternative entry point for experiencing the "Controller" aspect of the Web's natural compatibility with the MVC development pattern. As I've noted (in various posts) Web Services, as practiced by the REST oriented Web 2.0 community or SOAP oriented SOA community within the enterprise, is fundamentally about the ("Controller" aspect of MVC.

Ubiquity provides a commandline interface for direct invocation of Web Services. For instance, in our case, we can expose the Virtuoso's in-built RDF Middleware ("Sponger") and Linked Data deployment services via a single command of the form: describe-resource <url>

To experience this neat addition to Firefox you need to do the following:

  1. Download and install the Ubiquity Extension for Firefox
  2. Subscribe to the OpenLink Command for Resource Description
  3. Click on CTRL+Space (Windows / Linux) or Option+Space (Mac OS X)
  4. Type in: describe-resource <a-web-resource-url>

How to unsubscribe

At the current time, you need to do this if you've installed commands using ubiquity 0.1.0 and seek to use newer versions of the same commands after upgrading to ubiquity 0.1.1.
  1. To unsubscribe use type "about:ubiquity" into browser
  2. Click on unsubscribe links associated with you command subscription list

Enjoy!