Re: Proposed text on reliability in the web services architecture

On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 09:07:31AM -0700, Champion, Mike wrote:
> OK.  How about proposing some text that makes the case for the RESTful
> approach to reliable applications (as opposed to reliable messaging), and
> noting whatever downsides you care to admit.  I'm sure the rest of us will
> think of a few more :-)  

Ok, something short and sweet like;

"Web services that wish to inherit the properties of the REST
architectural style, can achieve a degree of reliability without the use
of some or all of the features of a reliable messaging facility.  For
example, if the service was to make its data accessible via PUT (an
idempotent method), then clients can simply reinvoke the method should
it not be clear if the previous message was successful or not.  For
non-idempotent methods such as POST, some of the expected features of
a reliable messaging facility could be reused; specifically, a message
identifier mechanism."

> > BTW, a quick comment about WS-Reliability.  It contains a 
> > "To:" header,
> > which appears to bump head first into issue 2;
> > 
> > http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/arch/2/issues/wsa-issues.html#x2
> 
> I don't follow.  It appears to RESOLVE issue 2 by specifying a SOAP
> extension mechanism for identifying the target of a message. "Bump head
> first into" sounds like it is a Bad Thing.

I can't find the discussion about it, but I remember the question of
whether that was a good idea or not came up.  The title of the issue
seems to reflect that.

I personally consider it a bad thing, yes (am I that predictable? 8-)
I believe that when using HTTP, the only authoritative place for the
"target URI" should be the HTTP request line.

Sorry, I didn't mean to distract from work on the reliability text with
this sidebar.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis

Received on Thursday, 9 January 2003 11:50:36 UTC