Re: The deep difference between request/response and fire-and-forget

Marc Hadley writes:

> I'm not denying that this is inefficient in network terms but from a
> programmer perspective its very simple.

I agree that it's a nuissance that you can wrap in layers that hide the 
nuissance.  I further agree that if the community decides to implement FAF 
over HTTP, that many application writers will indeed benefit from such 
higher level APIs.  Maybe or maybe not the abstractions used to hide the 
complexity will leak occasionally (e.g. your application won't promptly 
terminate for reasons that appear to be mysterious through the simple API: 
 under the covers, something is waiting for the responses to be returned, 
e.g. to make sure that the handler stays registered.)

We seem to agree that FAF over HTTP is inefficient in network terms, and 
for that reason among others I lean against standardizing it in W3C, or 
encouraging widespread use.  I don't doubt that someone, somewhere will 
find it a useful compromise, and I wouldn't discourage such communities 
from publishing a binding to do it.

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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Received on Tuesday, 31 January 2006 19:55:45 UTC