RE: Interest in standardizing Batch methods?

True, but...

...speaking from personal experience working on a document management
system, the temptation "give up" and just state "transactions are going to
solve this problem in general" is big. However, transactions can be very
expensive to implement, in particular in a HTTP server scenario. How many
concurrent transactions are you going to support? What are you going to do
if a client starts a transaction but doesn't finish it within a few minutes?

IMHO it makes a lot of sense to try to *avoid* them by

a) defining methods with the "right" level of transactionality (for
instance, see PROPPATCH or ORDERPATCH) or

b) try to do things using the existing locking and/or versioning machinery.


So at a minimum, I'd expect a working group activity on transactions to
start with a list of use cases. Then we can take a look at the use cases and
decide whether they require a generic transaction mechanism, or whether
something simpler can do that as well (and please don't say: I want to do
JDBC over HTTP).


Julian

--
<green/>bytes GmbH -- http://www.greenbytes.de -- tel:+492512807760

> -----Original Message-----
> From: w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org
> [mailto:w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Geoffrey M Clemm
> Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2003 11:02 PM
> To: WebDAV
> Subject: Re: Interest in standardizing Batch methods?
>
>
>
> If you are interested in defining a transactioning model, then
> it would be best to make that explicit, because the term "batch"
> is used to encompass many things.  To date, the WebDAV approach has
> been to define specific transacted operations (e.g. PROPPATCH),
> because that is something that can be implemented on a wide range
> of repositories, while generic transactioning support is likely to
> only be feasible on repositories that are actually databases.
>
> But enough repositories really are databases that it probably is
> worthwhile trying to define generic transactioning support for
> WebDAV.
>
> Cheers,
> Geoff
>
> >
> > 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 17:20:56 UTC