ACTION-751: making sure we are clear about idempotency

We got it right! That's 100% sure, I checked with Dom ;-)

idempotent: refers to an action that produces the same results no matter 
if it's executed one or more times.

If you think about an idempotent "delete" command, it just means that 
executing:
 delete test.txt
 delete test.txt
 delete test.txt
on a given test.txt file will always return "OK", even though the file 
is actually being deleted by the first call, and doesn't exist anymore 
in the remaining calls.

Specifically, one-time URIs are not idempotent: the first request yields 
an OK page, while further requests yield an error.

So the use we're making of the word "idempotency" is good.
I don't really think we need to explain it in the guidelines though, or 
else we need to start a Glossary section, but that does not quite sound 
mandatory.

Francois.

Received on Thursday, 22 May 2008 15:58:30 UTC