Re: POST abuse?

On Mon, Aug 27, 2001 at 04:01:34PM +0200, Yves Lafon wrote:
> On Sat, 25 Aug 2001, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> 
> > > When you use POST to mean "MYFOOMETHOD" you sacrifice specificity
> > > to get reuse of infrastructure. When you use POST to mean GET you
> > > undermine existing infrastructure. And in my mind, caching is the
> > > least interesting thing you lose. Hyperlinking and URI-based
> > > addressing is way more important....
> >
> > Agreed; I'd go as far as to say that no widely-deployed piece of Web
> > software can or will ever be able to cache a SOAP message based on
> > the current HTTP binding. I also agree that addressing is important -
> > the fact that people are encouraged by SOAP to place multiple logical
> > services on single URI is the primary reason why my stab at a SOAP
> > caching module [1] is more complex than it needs to be.
> 
> Note that, a POST reply can contain a Cache-Control header and then imply
> a certain level of idempotence. The first POST will have a side-effect but
> any subsequent POST with the same parameters won't. Of course you have the
> possibility to cache the result as a bonus of this idempotence property.

True. However, I don't know of any product that takes advantage of
this, as it's considered impractical. (Curious - does Jigsaw?)


> > However, I don't know that going to pure-GET is necessary to fix
> > this; merely requiring a 1-to-1 service-to-URI mapping would do the
> > trick.
> 
> Usually jsp engines are single servlets, and the URI of the jsp is
> passed as an argument to this servlet. You have then a 1-to-1 jsp-URI
> mapping, same as what can be done for a SOAP engine to respect this.

Yep. Or, just use query arguments.

Cheers,



-- 
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/
 

Received on Monday, 27 August 2001 10:34:13 UTC