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Reliable HTTP Draft

Here’s an interesting ‘pre-draft’ of HTTPLR, an ‘application protocol for reliable transmission of messages using HTTP’ (via the author’s blog). It doesn’t require throwing away already built out infrastructure. There are, however, a few wrinkes:

This draft does require support of the PUT method, which is not available out of the box on Apache, as well as the DELETE method, which again requires webdav to work with Apache.

It uses the DELETE method (rather than the POST) to communicate client knowledge of message transfer (section 8.3, 9.3). I’m not sure how I feel about that, as it seems to be mis-using that method.

Other than that, I like the idea. It seems really well thought out, but it would be nice to see some sample code.

One thought on “Reliable HTTP Draft

  1. Bill de hOra says:

    Thanks Dan. I’ve had conflicting feedback and questions on the use of PUT/DELETE v POST. That doesn’t surprise me; in evolving this protocol, I’ve gone back and forth on that part more than any other. Before draft-01, I’ll be writing a short rationale about the spec.

    As I mentioned, the protocol’s already been implemented. But a reference client and server is something I want to do.

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