Re: Rough text for State finding

Dave,

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 10:07:36AM -0700, David Orchard wrote:
> I've been wondering about the difference and relationship between
> resource state, entity state, protocol state, session state, and
> application state.

FWIW, earlier this year I took at stab at some of those on the RESTwiki;

http://rest.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?StateFaq

>I think there are layers of state, and multiple
> layers of protocols, which can be mixed together to confuse things from
> a modeling/layering perspective.  For example, I may have a stateful
> application protocol (bank app), a stateless network session protocol
> (http), and a stateful low level network data protocol (tcp). 

That's an interesting comment.  Why do you call the "bank app" the
application protocol and HTTP a "network session protocol"?  HTTP is
of course an application protocol, which AFAICT, makes the "bank app"
just a bunch of interlinked resources and their representations.  No?

If you mean to suggest that there's a layered relationship between
session state and resource state (using the StateFaq definitions), I'd
disagree.  I think both are primarily application layer inhabitants,
although "session state" is sometimes used to refer to sub-application
layer state too, e.g. TCP.

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker.  Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.          http://www.markbaker.ca
Coactus; Web-inspired integration strategies   http://www.coactus.com

Received on Tuesday, 18 October 2005 17:57:11 UTC