Re: Link and Unlink

This is one that I'm not in a terribly rush to push through. Publishing the
draft and resurrecting these now is mostly intended to get them on the
table again for people to use and get some experience with. Whether they
ultimately prove to be useful or not definitely has yet to be determined.

There are quite a few use cases where I can see these being used. Many
existing web apis are driven on the concepts of establishing links between
resources.

A Pub/Sub solution, for instance, is fundamentally based on links between
the publisher and a listeners. Using LINK and UNLINK, we could potentially
avoid having to create any kind of subscription management API... the flow
becomes nothing more than LINK and UNLINK calls...

  LINK /my-topic-resource HTTP/1.1
  Host: example.org
  Link: <http://example.com/my-listener>; rel="monitor"

Another case involves linking distributed or federated services to a user
profile...  for instance...

  LINK /profiles/jasnell HTTP/1.1
  Host: example.org
  Link: <http://example.org/my-weblog>; rel="weblog"

Once such a link has been established, a mechanism such as WebFinger could
be used to discover and enumerate such links.

For another case, imagine a collection resource to which we may want to add
an existing resource (as opposed to posting and creating a brand new
resource).

  LINK /some-collection HTTP/1.1
  Host: example.org
  Link: <http://example.com/some-item>; rel="item"

I could easily come up with a dozen more such examples. The main thing for
me right now, however, is getting this out there for folks to start
thinking about and tinkering around with. It gets the discussion started,
at the very least.

- James
On Oct 12, 2012 1:32 PM, "Mark Nottingham" <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:

> Personally, I'm -0 on this; I don't see demand for it yet, and we're
> really just learning how to build link-driven HTTP APIs. YMMV (in which
> case I'd be glad to hear about detailed use cases!).
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> On 09/10/2012, at 7:28 AM, James M Snell <jasnell@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > For review and comment...
> >
> >   http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-snell-link-method-00.txt
> >
> > Updated definition of LINK and UNLINK, taking RFC5988 into consideration
> and using language consistent from current httpbis draft (read: shamelessly
> and remorselessly lifted).
> >
> > Comments and feedback definitely welcome.
> >
> > - James
> >
>
> --
> Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/
>
>
>
>