[Oslc-Automation] 202 Accepted responses

[John Arwe]

We had a discussion on this week's call where I mentioned this as 
potentially very general use of Automation artifacts.  Here's a brief 
attempt to put some more meat on the bones.

202 Accepted gets 2 short paragraphs in [2616] and a minor update in the 
draft RFC long underway to supersede 2616, i.e. "httpbis" where it's 
hiding in [bispart2].

Where I see this fitting in pretty nicely is anywhere that a given HTTP 
request might turn out to be long-running (probably only in some cases) 
and the server wants to allow clients to drop the connection and 
effectively monitor for asynch completion via a "monitor" resource 
distinct from the original request's HTTP Request-URI.  I say "what if 
that monitor resource *is* an oslc:AutomationResult?"  I think it 
satisfies the limited text in HTTP/bis without any changes in Automation. 
The status/verdict fulfills the SHOULD, and Automation was purpose-built 
to handle the asynch case.  The due diligence yet to be done I think is to 
look for any required AR properties (like the link to an Automation Plan) 
that are not "obvious" how to fill in... FWIW I think the AP link is 
trivial; either it's a server-owned URI that's really of no concern to the 
client (because this all started from an HTTP request), or we find/invent 
an AP URI that corresponds to each existing HTTP method for which a 202 
might surface (or just blanket-cover all of them).
202 is a status code that any HTTP client could observe already; that much 
is very old news.  It's not widely used today, in part because it's often 
unneeded but also in part because it's underspecified... clients have no 
solid notion of what a monitor resource is, so there is nothing much to 
interop on.  Saying we use AR as the monitor simply fills in one of the 
underspecified points that HTTP chose to leave open.

[2616] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-10.2.3
[bispart2] 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics-22#section-6.3.3


Best Regards, John

Voice US 845-435-9470  BluePages
Tivoli OSLC Lead - Show me the Scenario
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