Re: Interest in standardizing Batch methods?

I am sure that you guys, who don't agree with standardising Batch 
method, have good reasons for that. But shall we be more clear about 
those reasons which might not quite clear for all. Of course I know 
some of those reasons by chasing the thread with the same subject in 
the WebDAV mailing list. But I think the WebDAV protocol is almost 
enough mature to interest many organisations and Web users. So that 
they would like to apply this protocol rather HTTP protocol, and use 
the WebDAV advantages such as metadata, access control,... to author 
Web resources. 

Now the question is: if the WebDAV is going to be a substitute for HTTP 
protocol, can it handle authoring all kind of Web resources as it 
claims, or still we need other conventions based on the HTTP protocol 
in order to support authoring Web resources except file systems. 

So if you believe the WebDAV as a protocol for authoring all Web 
resources (and not only the file systems), then how we can handle Web 
resources such as emails and databases. In order to implement some 
operations on those resources, you might use a sequence of WebDAV 
methods which need to be considered as one transaction. In those cases 
lock method cannot help. So what is your suggestion to handle those 
operations? 

I think a mechanism for supporting transactions is a strong point that 
WebDAV needs. 
      
> 
> I agree with Chris.  The easy things aren't worth doing (you get
> virtually
> all of the benefit by streaming your requests and not blocking
> waiting for
> the response to each request), and the hard things are very complex
> and
> any given approach is unlikely to be a good basis for
> interoperation.
> 
> Cheers,
> Geoff
> 
> Chris wrote on 07/17/2003 02:27:27 PM:
> 
> > And boy, the semantics of batch requests are pretty hairy. At the
> end of 
> 
> > the day is there much benefit? Is each request in a batch atomic
> and/or 
> > is the entire batch? (Do you have multiple levels of transactions?)
> How 
> > do you cache a batch? (Boy, there's a long topic...)
> > 
> > The HTTP overhead for multiple requests (made over the same TCP 
> > connection, mind you) is small (arguably, couldn't be much smaller)
> and 
> > if you want atomic batches, locks do an ok job of it.
> > 
> > I've certainly considered something like a PUT/PROPPATCH
> combination 
> > (for example if you had "required dead properties") but it's
> probably 
> > just easier to do a null lock and the two requests separately.
> > 
>

Received on Thursday, 17 July 2003 16:31:37 UTC