Re: POST abuse?

On Sat, 25 Aug 2001, Kurt Cagle wrote:
> Cookies are an attempt to push the state maintenance onto the client.
> Realistically, multiple transactions in a process will need to maintain a
> session token, but that session token should in all truth be passed back and
> forth between transactions in the SOAP message itself. A long term
> subscription services makes caching a transaction id necessary at the very
> least. Still I'm not sure how such cookies or handles, if passed within the
> body of the SOAP message itself, would necessarily place that much of an
> onus upon addressability.

Since you mention subscription services in particular, I'll mention that
ICE (http://www.icestandard.org) handles subscription state by giving a
"state" (cookie) to the subscriber, which is transmitted in the protocol
for every update request generated by the subscriber. This allows the
subscriber to be responsible for its state, which (1) allows the
syndicator not to have to track subscriber state, which is a good thing,
and (2) allows the subscriber to manage whether he transitioned from the
old state to the new state.

In terms of mapping the ICE application semantics over SOAP as a
transport, however, I don't think that we need SOAP to understand any of
this -- it's just another piece of data in a message, particularly because
ICE allows you to place transactions within multiple subscriptions into
the same physical message, so the subscription-level state cannot be at
the physical transport layer.

I'd also encourage anyone interested in subscription/syndication and SOAP
to send me some email. Thanks!

- Laird Popkin, Chair, ICE Authoring Group
  http://www.icestandard.org
  laird@3path.com, laird@io.com

Received on Sunday, 26 August 2001 08:19:05 UTC