- From: Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>
- Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 13:21:41 -0500
- To: Francis McCabe <fgm@fla.fujitsu.com>
- Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 08:55:34AM -0800, Francis McCabe wrote: > First of all, there are any number of actions which cannot be > represented by an update in the state; especially in any state that is > accessible to the requestor! Sure. PUT would be the wrong method to use for those actions, because it is defined such that the requestor provides a complete representation of the desired state of the resource. POST, on the other hand, is made for actions whose semantics are such that the resulting state of the resource is *not* known to the requestor. So in this theoretical sense, you have a spanning tree of mutators, as it can be said that "There are two kinds of mutators in the world, ...". 8-) In practice it's not quite that simple. For example, WebDAV has a COPY method because it's impractical to do a GET and PUT, not because the semantics don't match, nor even because of atomicity, but just because it's inefficient to retrieve a document with GET over a network, only to send it right back. > Secondly, simply telling the resource that the light is on is not > equivalent to actually switching the switch! It's equivalent in that the end result is the same. I'm not sure what differences you had in mind, but I'd be interested in hearing about them (though perhaps off-line, to www-archive, or www-talk, etc..) MB -- Mark Baker. Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA. http://www.markbaker.ca Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis
Received on Wednesday, 19 February 2003 13:18:49 UTC