Re: Few questions about REST

Hi Mark,

> > Do you mean something like
> > http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/DifferentlyAbledClients ?
> > As far as doc-lit SOAP is concerned, this approach can make those
doc-lit
> > SOAP requests which use POST but mean GET RESTful enough, at least
> > technically.
> >
> > Do you agree ?
>
> Almost exactly.  I made some comments on that Wiki page to Sam last
> week;
>
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rest-discuss/message/3978

Can you please send me a link to a correspondig WebServices Activity thread
you refer to in those comments ?

I'd like to return to an echoDocument example.
The best way (from the REST perspective) to echo a document is to decompose
a single POST operation into two operations, one is POST, another is GET
which will fetch an original document using a URL provided in a POST
response.
Would it be possible, using the above tunneling approach, to echoDocument
using a single POST in a RESTful manner ? For example, one may specify that
the semantics of this POST request are those of GET (using (SOAP)action
attribute), thus presenting a document to be echoed as GET parameters ? This
approach will not be purely RESTful, but it seems that the advantage is it's
only 2 network trips instead of 4 ones with POST and separate GET.
Can some extra efficiency associated with a single (more or less techically
RESTful) POST outweigh the benefits offered by a pure REST approach (POST
and GET to echo document) ?
Another question is about POSTing a document and providing a URL where a
document has to be returned. You said it's unRESTful, presumably because the
action of a server sending a document does not meet POST expectations. The
advantage of this approach, though, is that it allows a client to POST a
document, get HTTP 200OK with empty content and forget about it for some
time, later on, a server would sent a document back to a client. Would it be
RESTful to do it this way ?
A client should probably to a server that a document should not be sent to a
provided URL while a response to this POST is pending, that is a server
should just return 200OK and send a doc using a separate POST

Thanks
Sergey

Received on Thursday, 25 September 2003 08:16:37 UTC