Re: the meaning of stateless

On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 2:38 PM, Jan Algermissen
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On 09.05.2013, at 20:30, Bob Haugen <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 1:27 PM, Matt McClure <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > It seems to me that a client need not include all of the detail of the cart
>> > contents and payment method in the purchase request to conform with a
>> > statelessness constraint. I'd be happy to hear why I'm wrong if I am.
>>
>> That was my position in the argument with Mark Baker that I lost.
>>
>> When I say "I lost", I decided I agreed with Mark that to be stateless
>> and self-describing, the message to the server *did* need to include
>> all the detail of the cart contents, payment method, etc. etc. etc.
>
> My line of thought, too. Until this thread:
>
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rest-discuss/message/18998
>
> Since then I try to follow Roy's advice.

Yah, I never did follow up to that. I had to take time to think about
it, then forgot to respond.

I concluded that I disagreed with Roy about the lack of visibility in
a POST message. Certainly POST semantics are entirely opaque beyond
the oft-discussed-here "process this" practically-transport semantic,
but that doesn't impact the meaning of the rest of the message for
many purposes, e.g. archival (consider the previously discussed
HTML/CSS in a POST request rather than a GET response). On the other
hand, I agree that most of the interesting and important properties to
concern one's self with are those that derive from - as Roy says -
"representation by reference", though AFAICT, that is synonymous with
"stateful".

P.S. yes Bob, I agree that exchange is stateless.

Mark.