intertwingly

Simon Fell: Sam has updated his comment API to support a preview mode. Whilst I normally agree with what Sam writes regarding Web Services, this one just doesn't sit right with me, it smells very RPCish going against Sams own messaging message. It seems to me, that it ought to be that you send the same message to a different URI to do preview, not tag in a SOAP header.

Be careful when you attempt to label me.  ;-)

When given a choice between options A, B, and C, I generally reply YES, and then proceed to do exactly that.

But let's explore this one a bit further.  It tickles me to no end that the first message I received from somebody other than myself was from Radio.  If you were to personify that software, I'm sure you would agree that it 'thought' it was sending an RPC request.

These two worlds are not as far apart as they seem.

What I don't like are brittle, tightly coupled interfaces.  If you were to look at existing usage, the correlation between such interfaces and RPC is much higher than with messages, so I'll accept that a relatively good first order approximation is that messaging is better than RPC.  But in my book, that's not the whole story.

Now let's explore the option of supporting a different URI.  The first obvious choice is to append something like "?preview=yes" to the URI. This smells RPCish to me, but that's OK.  What's wrong with this is that the typical CGI will treat it as an optional parameter, and if they weren't looking for it, they would ignore it.

Anyway, if we can come to agreement on how to do this safely with another URI, then I will simply support that option too.

Fair enough?