Re: [9fans] 9P writes for directories

[Roman Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com>]

On Mar 27, 2009, at 6:36 PM, Uriel wrote:
> Some of us have been thinking about a 'sane' subset of HTTP plus some
> conventions, that could reasonably map to 9p.

Interestingly enough, that's exactly the quest I'm on. I'd appreciate
a chance
of talking to likeminded folks.

> The main issue is the huge amounts of crud in the HTTP spec and how to
> pick the sensible bits

Ever since I've read "JavaSript: the good parts" (and realized along the
way that the good parts were really quire close to Scheme) I tend
to thing that this approach of trying to identify "the good parts" is
the
only thing that can let me keep sanity in the modern world of
rampant web services. The good news (at least so far) seem to
be that there *are* good parts in HTTP.

> and discard the rest while remaining compatible
> with existing implementations; the main convention that needs to be
> added is a way to list directory contents, likely using something not
> too insane, like JSON.

Yeap.

> With some thought and care one could come up with a very simple,
> RESTful, and almost 9p-mappable replacement for the stinking bloated
> WebDAV and SOAP/XML-RPC abominations.


Can't agree more. Another reason to clean up this mess is a potential
to significantly simplify the way a typical web service is written. With
luck, there could be something as simple as lib9p/libixp (or even
execnet) to make writing webserives simple and fun.

  I'd love to exchange ideas on a more appropriate forum (if there's
any).

Thanks,
Roman.