Re: ISSUE-36: Summary of ways of making containers

On 24 Jan 2013, at 15:24, Alexandre Bertails <bertails@w3.org> wrote:

> On 01/23/2013 07:38 PM, Arnaud Le Hors wrote:
>> If I got this right, the premise for doing anything else other than
>> using POST the way it's done for other resources is that some don't want
>> to pay the price of having to parse the content to find out what the
>> type of the resource to be created is.
>> 
>> Yet, it also seems to be accepted that in most cases one will parse the
>> content to validate it anyway, if nothing else.
>> 
>> Furthermore, it is also accepted that we can't depend on something like
>> MKCOL and we need a fallback mechanism.
>> 
>> Given all that, I have to ask: Why don't we just accept that finding out
>> what type of resource needs to be created is a price some will have to
>> pay and stick to POST?
> 
> I'd be fine with that.

Just a question: Is it only during the creation time
when the POSTed content contains 

   <> a ldp:Container .

that that action creates a Container?

Or can one later append that triple to any resource to 
turn  it into a container?


> 
> Alexandre.
> 
>> 
>> In practice, I think there are two general categories of use cases. 1.
>> generic/vanilla server that simply stores triples and regurgitates them
>> without doing anything special with them. 2. application specific server
>> - this is a bug tracking system for instance - which translates the
>> triples into an actual application specific object.
>> 
>> In the latter case, the server for sure will want to parse the content
>> received to figure out exactly what type of object is to be created and
>> if the content received has all the bits and pieces required to satisfy
>> the application needs to create such an object. So, this requirement
>> adds no extra burden.
>> 
>> In the former case, there may be a real additional cost but is it
>> significant enough to justify doing anything different? And there may be
>> ways to optimize this by deferring that operation to when the server is
>> required to actually do anything different.
>> --
>> Arnaud  Le Hors - Software Standards Architect - IBM Software Group
> 
> 

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