- From: Henrik Frystyk Nielsen <henrikn@microsoft.com>
- Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 22:21:50 -0800
- To: "Mark Baker" <distobj@acm.org>, "Jacek Kopecky" <jacek@systinet.com>
- Cc: <xml-dist-app@w3.org>
>Heh. Well, linked off our home page is this; > >http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Architecture > >which includes some discussion about why GET is so special to >web architecture. GET is absolutely special and furthermore, I would claim that it is important for scalability and robustness that there be as few ways as possible of expressing a safe and idempotent request. Note that it is possible to have such requests decorated with access control, payment mechanisms, privacy control etc. without affecting their fundamental property of being safe and idempotent. Although HTTP can support an open-ended set of requests (GET, POST, DELETE, etc.) it really is optimized for GET. However, as you mention, it is not the only protocol that supports GET, and inherently there is no reason why SOAP could not have a general GET message type rather than thousands of getX and getY message types. I think "Give me a representation of yourself" applies just as well to SOAP resources as to any other resource, especially as SOAP does inherit many properties from HTTP. By taking out the SOAP body as a means of indicating that a SOAP message is safe and idempotent, you seem to propose that the body inherently is unsafe. I don't think this is necessarily the case - as has been discussed, a query is often safe and idempotent and seems to fit nicely within a SOAP body. Being able to serialize such a SOAP message in a URI seems like a good thing and if so the mapping to HTTP GET is straight forward. Rather than removing the body, however, one could potentially provide a schema for the body that any safe and idempotent SOAP message type could derive from. Henrik
Received on Friday, 1 February 2002 01:22:28 UTC