Re: [Pub-Sub-Task] Web-friendly pub/sub

On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 10:34:05PM +0600, Sanjiva Weerawarana wrote:
> Hi Mark,
> 
> > > >From a WSDL point of view, that's just a binding. So whatever
> > > the abstract syntax we agree on, we could define a RESTified 
> > > HTTP binding using the MONITOR method as you did quite easily.
> > 
> > How so?  How could you define a binding to an application method like
> > MONITOR?  I thought bindings were supposed to be protocol independant.
> 
> ?? Bindings are spsed to be exactly protocol dependent. That's

Oops, of course.  That's what I meant. 8-/

> where one specifies how to talk to the service .. and where is what
> the <port> indicates. So "how" is of course protocol dependent.
> 
> If the HTTP binding had a method attr we'd be done with this
> right?
>     <http:binding method="MONITOR"/> 
> (Does it already? I forget .. it probably does to support GET/POST.)
> 
> Am I missing something?

Yah, it has a method attribute, but that wouldn't fix it from my POV
because it doesn't address the problem that WSDL operations are the
same as HTTP methods, as I reported earlier;

http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2002/ws/desc/issues/wsd-issues.html#x64

Like I say, we don't need to go into that now (unless you want to) -
it's on the issues list.

> > FWIW, we use OPTIONS for this.  If you invoke the OPTIONS method on a
> > URI and the Allow response header includes "MONITOR" then you know you
> > can monitor that resource for event notifications.
> 
> So really MONITOR and OPTIONS are just part of the interface of
> the service. We can quibble (and I suspect we will) about whether
> those are part of a nice and RESTy standard interface or not ;-).

Well, they're certainly uniform, since I can invoke them on any
resource!  That's the bulk of the hard work in defining a RESTy
interface.

> > Side bar; hmm, I wonder if OPTIONS wouldn't be a better method to return
> > WSDL than GET?
> 
> Could be .. but this is the first time I heard of OPTIONS so I 
> really don't know .. ;-).

Heh.  After thinking a bit more about it, I believe OPTIONS is the
right method.  That might help remove some of the ambiguity between
the "service URI" and "WSDL URI" that has surfaced in some of the
discussion in WS-Arch.  I'll drop them a note.

Later,

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile.  Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.
http://www.markbaker.ca             http://www.idokorro.com

Received on Friday, 1 November 2002 12:32:17 UTC