- From: Henrik Frystyk Nielsen <henrikn@microsoft.com>
- Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 06:42:52 -0700
- To: "David Orchard" <dorchard@bea.com>, <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Cc: "Carine Bournez" <carine@w3.org>, "Christopher B Ferris" <chrisfer@us.ibm.com>, "Jean-Jacques Moreau" <moreau@crf.canon.fr>, "Herve Ruellan" <ruellan@crf.canon.fr>, <xml-dist-app@w3.org>, "Yves Lafon" <ylafon@w3.org>
There is no fixed or named mention of a server in the relationship
between a URI and a resource, for example as illustrated in [1]. REST
introduces a set of constraints that provides an architectural style for
accessing resources but you will note that not even HTTP [2] supports
the notion that a resource is *defined* by an origin server. An origin
server merely provides a means for accessing the resource, from [2],
section 1.3:
resource
A network data object or service that can be identified by a URI,
as defined in section 3.2. Resources may be available in multiple
representations (e.g. multiple languages, data formats, size, and
resolutions) or vary in other ways.
origin server
The server on which a given resource resides or is to be created.
Henrik
[1] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Model.html
[2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt
>Where do you figure there is no mention of a server? The REST
>architecture, particularly section 5 of Dr. Fielding's thesis,
>explicitly talks about connectors and components, including
>caches/proxies/origin servers. A cache is only a cache of
>something from an origin server in the web architecture.
>
>Another way of expressing this, is that just because there is
>another URI (the mid: or somesuch for attachments) for a
>representation, does not mean that the bytes in-flight
>suddenly became resources after being retrieved as
>representations. From my POV, and I guess henrik disagrees,
>is that Resources are defined by origin servers and not
>intermediary formats/representations.
Received on Thursday, 12 September 2002 09:43:00 UTC