[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Meta-pubs again




Just to resurrect this thread again,
I’m revisiting how to extract the meta-publishing portions of the first Atom Hierarchy Draft into a standalone spec independent of hierarchy considerations. I wanted to share my thoughts on that with this group, but its rather long winded so I've blogged about it [2]. I'd appreciate if anyone interested in 'meta-publishing' (creating a AtomPub Collection via AtomPub) would take a look and provide any feedback they might have.

Short version: IMHO creating a Collection is just like creating a Media Resource in regular AtomPub, with the side-effect that a new Collection is also created.

Thanks,
Colm Divilly

[1] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-divilly-atompub-hierarchy-00.txt
[2] http://cdivilly.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/meta-pubs-again-again/

Tim Bray wrote:

Back in January, I posted about the idea of a "meta-publication", something you can do CRUD on publications or collections. mod_atom needs something like this. Interestingly, several people wrote back and said yes, but there was disagreement on the mechanics. Here some of the plausible options that happen when you POST to a meta-pub:

- create a new collection in the same workspace
- create a new workspace in the same service doc with one or more collections - create a new service doc with one or more workspaces with one or more collections

The reason I'm raising this again is that I'm going to enhance the Ape to test my own implementation (doesn't matter that much which of the above it does) and since this isn't standardized, I guess I'll be doing that in a private fork. If there were sufficient experience and appetite to standardize these semantics, well then, I'd be able to just enhance the Ape.

One could also think of emulating SQL culture: the ISO SQL committee, whenever it was faced with a choice between two options, usually adopted both. You could imagine a new attribute atom:feed@app:meta

<atom:feed app:meta="collection|workspace|service">

depending on which of the above the server would respond to a POST with.

I'm unconvinced at the moment that we're ready to plunge down the standardization path, but I thought it would be polite to ask.

-Tim