I'm trying to RESTify an existing Web application, and have a stylistic question. Imagine that a Web application fronts for a database, where all of the ...
... I have a thought about that that I'll bring up in another thread shortly. ... Why not POST to http://www.example.org/search? The good thing about doing...
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 7, 2002 3:02 pm
3
... hmm. Individual searches are separate resources; i.e., they have different query strings, so this wouldn't necessarily work, no? (It wouldn't make sense to...
... Why not? Don't think of the resource as being a search, but think of it as the result of a search. "http://www.google.com/search?q=foo" is the set of all...
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 7, 2002 6:45 pm
5
... Well, there's no problem POSTing an update to /search (or whatever), but doing a query through POST doesn't seem very RESTy at all. So, to review (and make...
... Right. I guess I wasn't clear, my apologies. ... Hmm, if you're creating a new resource it should be returned with a 201. You won't get an auto redirect,...
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 8, 2002 1:42 am
7
... Hmm. Seems good; will have to play. ... [...] ... What's the media type for an HTML form which is the editable representation of a resource again? ;) Also,...
... I was hoping to allow requests to the record resource http://www.example.com/addresses/thePerson to negotiate the representation returned, so that the...
Why do so many websites use home-spun HTML/cookie authentication (login/password) instead of HTTP authentication? I'm guessing it is all about user interface...
Paul Prescod
paul@...
Jan 10, 2002 5:48 pm
11
... Exactly right. This is a major issue, as it prevents many tasks from being automated. ... I don't know that there's a quick fix. One thing I was thinking...
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 10, 2002 6:13 pm
12
... I think the issue is more that publishers don't have much control over the authentication state on the browser; things like remembering the username...
I've raised an issue [1] with the XForms WG regarding their lack of support for PUTing xml instance data. Supporting PUT would seem to be very helpful to...
I don't know much about XForms but this little bit worried me: "My personal take is that HTTP GET is broken beyond repair for I18N-safe form-data submission....
Paul Prescod
paul@...
Jan 15, 2002 11:58 pm
15
... I'm not worried about this at all. GET forms and POST forms are completely different beasts. The latter is for submitting resource representations, while...
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 16, 2002 1:04 am
16
... I don't follow you. A form is a user interface. Today forms are often used as user interfaces to GET and to POST (i.e. filling in an information request as...
Paul Prescod
paul@...
Jan 16, 2002 1:45 am
17
... I agree that it would be a problem if this were the case. But in my time on the HTML WG, including while work on XForms was being done there, it was never...
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 16, 2002 3:09 am
18
Please contribute comments on this article I am working on for xml.com. ============== Second Generation Web Services In the early days of the Internet, it was...
Paul Prescod
paul@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:07 am
19
... I've used the ?method= approach for a couple years (actually used do:method for collision avoidance) to tunnel methods. I've also used ? accept= to tunnel...
... Even if you tunnel Accept header in the URL (which means you need to control the server or have a generic intermediary that un-tunnels them) you'll want to...
John Barton has replied [1] to my e-mail, saying that his interpretation of REST is that POST is more appropriate than PUT. Still being a REST novice (and...
... Of course! How else can you explicitly set state and have intermediaries know about it (so they can cache it)? You can't do that with POST. ... I don't...
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 16, 2002 6:48 pm
23
... Mark N. believes (and without looking it up, I would guess he's right) that the semantics of PUT are that an immediately following GET should return the...
Paul Prescod
paul@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:07 pm
24
... Is this intermediary argument realistic? Let's say I'm going through a big honking cache at AOL. I do a PUT. Now all AOL users in the world have an updated...
Paul Prescod
paul@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:11 pm
25
... Actually, that's not quite right. There's content negotiation to be considered. ... REST doesn't limit the number of methods. You might need 10 to ...
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:21 pm
26
... It only takes one person at MSN to do a GET on that same resource, and for MSN to cache that response, to have the same effect. This is a really small...
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:25 pm
27
... Right. So and of course the same goes for the original originator network AOL. So why worry about the caching of PUTs? The cache can just wait for the next...
Paul Prescod
paul@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:34 pm
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... I don't think I've seen a strong case that this optimization is important. Would Wiki be noticably better if it used PUT instead of POST? Paul Prescod...
Paul Prescod
paul@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:36 pm
29
... There's *currently* a small advantage; caching. There may be a larger advantag ... I'm not rabid about the need for PUT in XForms. It wouldn't be a ...
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:44 pm
30
... Oopsie with that last message. I'll continue my thought here. There's *currently* a small efficiency advantage in having PUT as its own method; caching....
