[Seaside] Re: Seaside and REST

[Klaus D. Witzel]

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