RE: Issue 5; GET vs GetLastTradePrice

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 01, 2003 9:40 PM
> To: Christopher B Ferris
> Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: Issue 5; GET vs GetLastTradePrice
> 
> 

> 
> My resolution for the new year is to not get side-tracked into a
> wandering perma-thread.  I'm going to focus solely on the 
> value of URIs
> and GET as a superior means of retrieving data, whether a human is
> nearby to interpret it or not.

Uhh, I thought that was last year's resolution, which you kept quite well,
and helped persuade the TAG and XMLP group to add the web method feature to
SOAP 1.2.  What further do you want this year?  The WSA definitely takes
SOAP 1.2 and the various discussions that led to the web method feature as
authoritative input.  I think we've acknowledged that the example you point
to in Issue 5 is pretty was created by a mass cut-n-paste from some other
pre-web-method document.

If you want the tool vendors to support the web method feature, this isn't
the group you have to persuade.  

BTW, I personally suspect that we'll resolve Issue 5 to say something like
"trade a few parameters for some info" requests should IN GENERAL be done
with HTTP GET .... but acknowledge that both Web and SOAP toolkits currently
make using POST the path of least resistance.  What are some of the points
in favor of using GET vs POST in a particular scenario?  I can think of:

GET: - allows hyperlinking to a "web service" invocation, supports HTTP
cacheing ....

POST -  allows arbitrarily large amounts of data to be passed to the web
service invocation, avoids URI encoding problems with non-ASCII data ....

Thus, I can sympathize with the tool vendors (and original SOAP authors) who
used POST because it always works even though is sub-optimal for a large
class of situations, rather than putting in the logic to determine whether
GET or POST is more optimal for a particular situation. Our job, to beat my
favorite dead horse once again, is  a matter of defining the conditions
under which one or the other is more appropriate.   Your assistance (and Roy
Fielding's, of course) would be welcomed to craft the language defining
those conditions for the WSA document.

Received on Thursday, 2 January 2003 09:33:38 UTC