[occi-wg] Semantics of OCCI API: nouns and verbs

[Sam Johnston]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Richard Davies <
richard.davies at elastichosts.com> wrote:

>
> Agreed in principle, but there's an implementation issue that many common
> HTTP libraries will only do POST/GET, not PUT/DELETE, so need url versions
> of 'UD' anyway.
>

Wow, you guys have really thought about it :) This problem more manifests
itself in enterprise firewalls and proxies but agreed, support for all the
HTTP verbs is sadly limited. That's exactly what the X-HTTP-Method-Override
header was invented for.


> Perhaps the compromise position is to work both ways:
>
> POST/GET/PUT/DELETE /<object>  accepts all 4 CRUD operations
> POST /<object>/set             alternative form of 'U' (if cannot PUT)
> POST /<object>/destroy         alternative form of 'D' (if cannot DELETE)
> POST /<object>/create          alternative form of 'C' (for symmetry)
> GET /<object>/info             alternative form of 'R' (for symmetry)
>

I'd be more inclined to go with one or the other, and in case it's not
obvious yet I've got my sights set on the myriad Google GData
clients<http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/clientlibs.html>(Java, .NET,
PHP, Python, Objective-C and Javascript, all under Apache
licensing), and of course the army of developers who are already familiar
with their APIs.

> Non-CRUD operations such as start, stop, restart, clone, snapshot, etc.
> > can be exposed by "actuator" URLs, which fits nicely with HATEOAS.
>
> The actuator URLs for these can then fit in alongside the alternative
> actuator forms of the CRUD operations themselves.
>

Right, the format for the URLs should be specified too, but the client can
tell what methods to expose based on which are present (thus saving the user
from pushing buttons that are guaranteed to result in errors, like
"start"ing an abstract template or "stop"ping a stopped machine).

Sam
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