On Jun 20, 2007, at 5:20 PM, Yaron Goland wrote:
What I have tried to do in this e-mail is take an existing Web3S
example data structure and translate it into ATOM.
Ouch, that looks like a lot of work. Look, you've chosen a data model
that's deeply un-"publication" like. Presumably your reasons for
doing this are good. I have not heard any voices saying "The Live
team should be required to use APP for updating their address book".
All the angst arose because of the initial statements along the lines
of "APP is flawed in the general case and can't do concurrent updates
and can't handle non-atom-entry data objects so we're going to have to
invent a new protocol." Phrased that way, it sounded like you were
trying to invent a new general-purpose update-web-content data model,
and that would be controversial.
The world has relatively few deeply-nested hierarchical data objects
with half-a-billion leaves. It's unsurprising that you need some
special techniques to manage yours. There are people out there who
will whine if what you choose isn't RESTful, but the universe of
RESTful protocols is bigger than APP.
I suppose it's possible that if APP client & server implementations
become as ubiquitous as seems likely, you might come under pressure to
build a bridge. Might it be reasonable to consider offering a user a
view of their own (relatively small and flat) contact list as an Atom
publication, so an APP-client-equipped cellphone could manage the
online contacts? I dunno, maybe.
Remember the Monty Python sketch? "No, this isn't the room for an
argument." -Tim