- From: John J. Barton <John_Barton@hpl.hp.com>
- Date: Tue, 05 Feb 2002 17:08:49 -0800
- To: noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com, distobj@acm.org
- Cc: mnot@mnot.net ('Mark Nottingham'), skw@hplb.hpl.hp.com (Williams, Stuart), xml-dist-app@w3.org
At 05:12 PM 2/5/2002 -0500, noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com wrote: >... I particularly understand >it's applicability to the many situations in which there are stateful >resources, and a desire to create/update/access them in a consistent >manner. Resources are things you GET representations from. This barrier -- you don't get resources but only representations -- has to work in the opposite direction. So you can't create/update resources. You can only send in representations. That's why the Web didn't buy PUT. By that I mean we did a big experiment and the results are in: POST wins by a landslide. Yes there are some confusing factors, but POST has exactly the property of sending in a representation (ok, just some funny data) with an impact on later GETs That impact is determined by the server in some encapsulated way, to preserve its barrier between representations and resources. That barrier is key to web server sanity. The other magic of POST has not (yet?) been realized in web services. Critical to the progress of web technology has been the ability of web site developers to instantly upgrade their system by changing the content of forms downloaded by GET then POSTed. Legendary are the annals of distributed systems developed, hyped, deployed, and then frozen in time. Any system that does not incorporate an upgrade solution as effective as web apps will join them. Web services included. Returning to Stuart's thread, this line of reasoning says: "don't worry about the POST response, worry about how the client formed the message". Semantic ignorance is bliss on the client side: the less it knows the more we can accomplish. If web service requires simultaneous upgrade (homogeneity and central admin), we have created a lot of angle brackets for nothing. John. ______________________________________________________ John J. Barton email: John_Barton@hpl.hp.com http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/John_Barton/index.htm MS 1U-17 Hewlett-Packard Labs 1501 Page Mill Road phone: (650)-236-2888 Palo Alto CA 94304-1126 FAX: (650)-857-5100
Received on Tuesday, 5 February 2002 20:09:30 UTC