UWS 0.4

[Paul Harrison]

On 2008-06 -12, at 00:35, Patrick Dowler wrote:

>
> I find one part of the UWS a bit odd. It says that DELETE to the job  
> resource
> deletes it (fine), but that a POST to that resource also deletes it.
>
> When one creates a job (POST to the job list) some parameters can be  
> included
> (presumably service-specific params). I would have assumed that one  
> could
> POST more params to the job resource itself and have them treated  
> the same
> way (at last up until a POST to the phase resource to start it  
> executing).
>
> This would allow a client to, for example:
>
> - POST to the job list (create a job, along with some parameters)
> - GET the quote
> - decide where the output should go (long quote == not my laptop :)
> - POST to the job with dest=<something>
> - POST to the phase
>
> It also just doesn't seem RESTy that POST would delete something. Is  
> there a
> reason for this? A good one?
>
The reason is a purely practical one - that HTML forms cannot send  
DELETEs, so to accommodate this the POST to form with ACTION=DELETE is  
used to destroy the job also. This is actually a change from version  
0.3 where any POST to the job object would delete it after creation,  
and was introduced to allow the scenario that you outline above. I  
think that if we are too strictly RESTy then we will receive  
complaints from the faction who want to have these protocols driven as  
easily as possible from web browsers, - if XForms had made the impact  
on the mainstream as it had promised then we would not have to make  
this concession.

Cheers,	
	Paul.