[Seaside] Re: Seaside and REST
Klaus D. Witzel
klaus.witzel at cobss.com
Thu Mar 29 12:50:02 UTC 2007
Hi Andreas,
on Thu, 29 Mar 2007 10:15:04 +0200, you wrote:
> ... But the last time I checked, Seaside utilized HTTP and HTTP has some
> very clear rules (see [1]) which state explicitly:
>
> "In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and
> HEAD methods SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other
> than retrieval.
Living on the side where the http logs are written, for something like a
decade now, this statement clearly means resources like "document" content
and is WebDAV minded, not to say file-oriented.
Replacing a negotiable document resource by a server side script which
responds what a related file resource would respond does not add much
change that view.
Besides of that, the counter in the Seaside counter example is *not*
stored (as would be suggested by POST) but it is incremented. Doing
incremental changes to a living object is not addressed by any HTTP
request method ;-) For example, all WebDAV resources and Web2Mail scripts
are considered to be dead (in the sense of a stateless, always repeatable
request+response scenario).
Another illustrating use case is HTTP-tunneling. What method SHOULD they
NOT use, POST or GET? IIRC they use both and the choice depends on what
method allows *huge* amounts of bytes transfered upstream (POST) and what
not (GET).
[this is just from experience, no offense intended.]
> These methods ought to be considered "safe". This allows user agents to
> represent other methods, such as POST, PUT and DELETE, in a special way,
> so that the user is made aware of the fact that a possibly unsafe action
> is being requested."
Then, how would you access a constantly changing "document" resource like
a Croquet application running elsewhere, with HTTP. HTTP request methods
where invented with "a resource is a file and the version and quality of
the file's content can be negotiated by a HTTP method" in mind, IMO.
Later then an oops happened and POST was added. Even later the philosophy
of GET v.s. POST was invented.
Just my 0.05 CHF.
/Klaus
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