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XDI - the Dataweb

Stefan Tilkov, Feb 9, 2004

I had never heard of this before (not sure whether I need to feel ashamed now) and came across XDI due to Mark Baker’s post. I just speedread the whitepaper, and I believe in this case, he has a point — it doesn’t seem obvious how this differs from the Web so much as to merit a complete set of new standards (as if we didn’t have enough of those, already). The notion of automatic synchronization between resources seems interesting, though; I’m not sure whether a purely Web/REST-based approach to this exists somewhere …

On February 10, 2004 4:41 PM, Mark Baker said:

It’s good to know that I occasionally have a point. 8-)

Re synchronization, it depends what your needs are but there are a number of possible solutions including DRP, delta encoding (RFC 3229), vanilla GET or POST (depending upon who’s the master), or more generally, pub/sub ala KnowNow. That’s just off the top of my head. The key REST constraint to keep in mind when syncing is to remain stateless; entity tags help a lot there.

On February 11, 2004 8:40 AM, Stefan Tilkov said:

Thanks for the pointers, Mark!