[oslc-core] Creating multiple resources in one POST?

[John Arwe]

> Can this [batched creates] be considered as part of OSLC core? 
"In theory", anything could be.  I think the pragmatic issues have to do 
with consensus.  The idea of posting to a collection when you want the 
create semantic is not something OSLC invented at all.  It was in fairly 
widespread use in the wild already; AtomPub is the most commonly cited 
"original spec source" for the pattern, but I suspect lots of people would 
recognize it as factory create.  OSLC Core "just" took that pretty well 
accepted Best Practice, applied it to RDF data, and *wrote down* the 
result -- the latter being a gap that is being recognized in the Semantic 
Web community generally.  Some invention along the way was necessary 
(RDF/JSON) since the larger community had not prioritized that.
In practice, I think it's a harder row to hoe with batched-anything. There 
is a much higher proportion of "invent new" relative to the case above, 
and no existing community consensus I'm aware of to "just write down". 
Implementations are headlights for spec work, have to be careful not to 
over-drive them.

> And then it really helps the users to be able to create multiple 
resources with a single POST.
This seems like it forgets about the error handling case you already 
acknowledged.  Life is [relatively, still have to solve Location] easy 
when it all works.  It's the partial error handling where it becomes 
difficult to achieve consensus - if you require ACID behavior, that's a 
fairly stringent server implementation requirement.  If you don't, 
well-behaved clients may have a lot of work to do.

Don't get me wrong, batched requests generally show up in many of the 
scenarios I'm expecting to see flowing soon from Tivoli; updates + 
creates.  Maybe that eventually leads to a pattern people agree on.  It 
simply does not appear to be imminent based on the actual scenarios coming 
in so far.

Best Regards, John

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