Re: QUERY Verb Proposal

On 01/19/2015 05:30 PM, ashok malhotra wrote:
> Sandro, some questions inline ...
>
> All the best, Ashok
>
> On 1/19/2015 5:19 PM, Sandro Hawke wrote:
>> I suggest the spec say how to do it with GET as well as QUERY, and 
>> what exactly the differences are.
> Sorry, how would you do it with GET?  Are you talking about stored 
> queries?

Even with not-stored queries, you can still just turn them into a GET, 
right?   (assuming the query is under 2k, at least, although that IE 
limit might not apply to LDP situations)

One simple design:

1.  Do a HEAD
2.  Response includes Link: <http://q.example> rel=query-via
3.  GET 
http://q.example?r=url-of-original-resource&t=query-type&q=your-query

It's approximately the interchange you'll need with QUERY:

1.  Do a HEAD
2.  Get back some response saying QUERY is supported
3.  QUERY url-of-original resource, body=your query

One of the reasons the HTTP WG is very unlikely to standardize this is 
that there's so little technical advantage to doing this with a new verb 
(at least as far as I can see).   The main reasons would be queries > 
2k, but your saved queries solve that, and allowing intermediate nodes 
to understand and cache based on query semantics, ... and MAYBE the Get 
option would allow that.

BTW, all my query work these days is on standing queries, not one time 
queries.  As such, I think you don't actually want the query results to 
come back like this.   You want to POST to create a Query, and in that 
query you specify the result stream that the query results should come 
back on.  And then you GET that stream, which could include results from 
many different queries.   That's my research hypothesis, at least.

        -- Sandro

>>
>> Assume the HTTP WG will say no for the first several years, after 
>> which maybe you can start to transition from GET to QUERY.
>>
>> Alternatively, resources can signal exactly which versions of the 
>> QUERY spec they implement, and the QUERY operation can include a 
>> parameter saying which version of the query spec is to be used. But 
>> this wont give you caching like GET.   So better to just use that 
>> signaling for constructing a GET URL.
> Gimme a little more to help me understand how this would work.
>>
>>        -- Sandro
>>
>>
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 20 January 2015 00:36:15 UTC