[Registry-dev] APP based protocol for accessing the Registry

[Glen Daniels]

Hi Chathura:

Some comments on your doc.  I've made some changes in the doc itself, 
with change tracking on, but the ones that I consider "major" or 
warranting discussion are separated out here.

* What metadata are we really going to post with a new collection?  Its 
media-type (or some other appropriate identifier to tell us that it's a 
Synapse repo, etc), for sure, and a suggested name... but I would think 
that most of the rest of the metadata (author, creation-time, etc) would 
be generated by the server.  So what I'm asking is - do we really need 
to POST Atom or can we just use a simpler format like form data?  (Note 
that if we do the latter then browsers would be able to create 
collections via a simple HTML form)

* Same question as above for comments, ratings, tags.  I think for all 
of these we want to consider just simple form-encoded content.  Comments 
are the only one that we also want to allow Atom for, IMHO - if you POST 
an atom comment, we'll respect it, and if you POST a simple form, we'll 
store it and give you back atom later.  Ratings and tags should just be 
POSTing the number or the tag string.

* Should we be returning Atom for ratings/tags?  I'd like to err on the 
side of simplicity here and just return some simple XML.

* I'm not sure we should be PUTting to a collection in order to change 
its metadata.  First off, what metadata are we talking about?  We can't 
change the author/modification times.  We can change the properties on 
it, but that's done by POST/PUT to "collection;properties[/prop]".  What 
else?  I think in general the idea of PUT is that it updates the 
resource with a new representation - so for collections I think if we 
allowed PUT we should be allowing a wholesale replacement of the 
contents of the collection, which I definitely don't want to do.  This 
is admittedly an art not a science but it feels odd to me.  If we can 
get rid of this idea entirely and just use properties that'd be good. :)

* Are Atom posts going to be media resources too, or can those just be 
regular entries?  I.e. if I was using the Registry as a blog server I 
wouldn't need a media entry necessarily, right?

Thanks,
--Glen
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