Re: HTTP 1.1 pipelining

S. Mike Dierken wrote:

> I'm looking into request pipelining & had a question about the kind of 
> requests allowed.
> The RFC says only idempotent requests should be pipelined.
> This FAQ 
> (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/http/pipelining-faq.html) from 
> Mozilla says PUT should not be used because it isn't idempotent. 
> Except that it is. PUT is idempotent (repeatable with deterministic 
> results).
>  
> <>Which is it? 

I'm pretty sure that the Mozilla FAQ is wrong in this case. Perhaps the 
author is confusing being idempotent with having no side-effects. You're 
right that the semantics of PUT do make it acceptable for pipelining.

Of course, given the number of web applications out there these days 
which break idempotence even for GET requests, I'd be worried about 
assuming that property for anything on the web.


Ian Clelland
<ian@veryfresh.com>

Received on Friday, 28 May 2004 14:34:42 UTC