Re: Should Web Services be served by a different HTTP n+1?

On 2013-01-24 21:34, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 12:48 PM, Nico Williams <nico@cryptonector.com
> <mailto:nico@cryptonector.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 9:30 AM, Julian Reschke
>     <julian.reschke@gmx.de <mailto:julian.reschke@gmx.de>> wrote:
>      > On 2013-01-24 04:18, Grahame Grieve wrote:
>      >> What would be right http status code to use? It's a client
>     error, right?
>      >> The nearest appropriate status code would be 422, but I'm not sure
>      >> whether that can be used outside webdav. Either way, there's a bunch
>      >
>      > It can.
>      >
>      > [...]
>      >
>      > Augmenting error handling for web services is an interesting
>     topic. See
>      > prior proposals about Link relations, or a JSON typed response
>     body format
>      > for 4xx/5xx.
>
>     I've seen APIs that handle errors in JSON-encoded response bodies,
>     including one that always returns success in HTTP but errors in the
>     response body, which is kinda weird, but if none of the HTTP status
>     codes make sense...  (that was the author's defense).
>
>
> It makes perfect sense from a layering perspective.
>
> In an RPC call I probably want HTTP errors to be strictly limited to
> reporting network failures. 'entry not found' is a completely different
> result from 'machine is down'
>
> entry not found is arguably a successful transaction that returned an
> empty list of results.

In that case you are (ab)using HTTP as transport protocol.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Thursday, 24 January 2013 20:54:46 UTC