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 ...
2
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 7, 2002 3:02 pm
... 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...
... 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...
4
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 7, 2002 6:45 pm
... 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...
... 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...
6
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 8, 2002 1:42 am
... 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,...
... 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...
... Oops, that should be [1] http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118696 -- Mark Nottingham http://www.mnot.net/...
10
Paul Prescod
paul@...
Jan 10, 2002 5:48 pm
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...
11
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 10, 2002 6:13 pm
... 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...
... 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...
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Paul Prescod
paul@...
Jan 15, 2002 11:58 pm
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....
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Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 16, 2002 1:04 am
... 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...
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Paul Prescod
paul@...
Jan 16, 2002 1:45 am
... 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...
17
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 16, 2002 3:09 am
... 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...
18
Paul Prescod
paul@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:07 am
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...
... 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...
22
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 16, 2002 6:48 pm
... 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...
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Paul Prescod
paul@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:07 pm
... 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...
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Paul Prescod
paul@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:11 pm
... 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...
25
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:21 pm
... 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 ...
26
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:25 pm
... 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...
27
Paul Prescod
paul@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:34 pm
... 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...
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Paul Prescod
paul@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:36 pm
... 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...
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Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:44 pm
... 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 ...
30
Mark Baker
distobj@...
Jan 16, 2002 7:55 pm
... 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....
