RE: Operation dispatch when there isn't a SOAP body.

> I am OK with improvements to the Primer.

me too.

> The issue of dispatch is somewhat artificial. It was caused by the 
> non-RESTful practice of using a single endpoint for all Web service 
> requests and then relying on the SOAP engine to dispatch the request to 
> the right implementation object. For example, the early Apache SOAP 
> implementation called this endpoint the "router".

> REST is based on the proper use of well-designed URLs. Web servers, 
> including Java servlet containers, have the ability to map URLs to code, 
> e.g. a servlet can handle a URL pattern.

> Your proposal for the definition of a default HTTP location for 
> interfaceless bindings is interesting. However, I wonder how useful an 
> interfaceless binding is for REST. I think toolkits would probably 
> implement some strategy for generating HTTP locations based on the input 
> arguments of methods.

I'm not sure I fully understand the proposal, but I'm reminded 
of the dispatching discussion we had for SOAP, where we were cautious 
to specify GEDs given wsa:Action or indeed other mechanisms might be 
employed, I recall we just require there to be some 'uniqueness' ..

Given Web frameworks use a wide variety of dispatching methods, 
often as an ordered sequence of regex expressions, 
are we obliged to be similarly vague for the HTTP binding?

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html
http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/url_dispatch/

Paul

Received on Thursday, 4 January 2007 10:58:05 UTC