- From: Walden Mathews <waldenm@optonline.net>
- Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 14:45:21 -0500
- To: Ugo Corda <UCorda@SeeBeyond.com>, www-ws-arch@w3.org
----- Original Message ----- From: "Ugo Corda" <UCorda@SeeBeyond.com> To: "Walden Mathews" <waldenm@optonline.net>; <www-ws-arch@w3.org> Sent: Monday, February 24, 2003 1:29 PM Subject: RE: Snapshot of Web Services Glossary > > >Then there's a reference to a "synchronous HTTP POST". > >Not sure if "synchronous" adds any meaning there. > > I think that "synchronous" in that context refers to the fact that the HTTP POST is expected to carry the response back on the same HTTP interaction. "Same interaction" is a problem to generalize, although I get your meaning fine here. It would also be on the same connection, but again generalizing, a connection is just an agreement of connected parties, nicely recursive. But, perhaps more significantly, the "same interaction" signifies a time frame within to succeed or fail? > > It's probably qualified as "synchronous" to distinguish it from an "asynchronous" HTTP POST, where the HTTP response (which will come back just because HTTP is a synchronous protocol) might be viewed by the client as just an ack from the server, or might be ignored. The "real" SOAP response would in that case come on a separate interaction and not via the initial HTTP response. Okay, I understand the explanation, but I have issues with the language still. If I say my client "does a synchronous HTTP POST", I'm implying that my client can control whether the server processes the posted data now or defers processing until later, in which case the responses will be different as you describe above. Meanwhile, there's an HTTP status code that means "I got it, but haven't processed it yet.", so there's no additional protocol needed for a client to know whether it got a post-processing representation or just an ack. Using "synchronous" or "asynchronous" in this setting is mis- leading, and so should be avoided. Surely better terms can be found; not so surely, perhaps no such terms are really needed. I agree that request/response in HTTP can be regarded as "synchronous", due to almost universal although vague assumptions about how long the whole transaction ought to take. Walden
Received on Monday, 24 February 2003 14:45:35 UTC