This is a single archived entry from Stefan Tilkov’s blog. For more up-to-date content, check out my author page at INNOQ, which has more information about me and also contains a list of published talks, podcasts, and articles. Or you can check out the full archive.

Batch!

Stefan Tilkov,

James Snell shows an example of GData batch updates and writes:

If the mere sight of this doesn’t give you shivers and shakes, let me give you a few reasons why it should.

Shivering and shaking, I note that in addition to his (very valid) reasons, XML fragments like

<batch:operation type="insert"/>

should make it obvious: Anytime you find yourself adding words like “operation” to your representation, you’ve violated one of the core RESTful HTTP principles, which is that the intent should be communicated using the HTTP verb.

On October 29, 2007 2:22 PM, Bill de hOra said:

I hope this helps make it clear why some of us in the Atompub WG argued batch out of the spec. There are other essential problems with batch over HTTP; I’m not sure it can be done cleanly.

Incidentally, I don’t see how gdata batch is any worse than the features draft or requests to use Atompub to upload binary+atom in one shot for media resource handling.

On October 30, 2007 1:26 AM, Erik said:

I started a comment but it got too long, so I put it here: http://appside.blogspot.com/2007/10/poking-at-roa.html

On October 30, 2007 5:14 AM, James Snell said:

Bill, I can understand the reference to compound posts, but I’m not sure why you’re drawing a comparison to the features draft.