Noah Slater wrote:
On 16 Aug 2010, at 19:55, Miles Fidelman wrote:
True, but... HTTP is not necessarily an ideal protocol for many-to-many
replication, nor is HTTP 30 years old. There's a lot of experience that dates
back further - for example, UUCP is probably a much better protocol for
large-scale eventual consistency than the pair-wise approach currently used by
CouchDB.
The web is the largest technological system mankind has ever built. It's not
perfect, but it works. Not only does it work, but it comes with the largest
selection of middleware components imaginable.
It is both ubiquitous and commodity, in almost every respect. From network and
firewall support, through libraries, to clients. Being able to talk to CouchDB
from your web browser is easily (for me) the best thing about CouchDB, and far
outweighs any drawbacks, such as protocol overhead.
Actually, I'd dispute that. The INTERNET is perhaps the largest system
ever built, the web rides on top of a lot of lower level
infrastructure. There's a lot of other stuff riding on top of the
underlying IP infrastructure - email, VoIP, chat, etc. - which don't
rely on HTTP. (Note: I speak as someone who dates back to almost the
beginning - I spent a good part of my career at BBN, just as we were
transitioning the ARPANET to TCP/IP, and it was serving as the hub of
the then fledgling Internet).
On 16 Aug 2010, at 20:02, Jan Lehnardt wrote:
But we have a rock solid implementation (*cough*) that works today :) — Also "better" is
hardly objective :) — Noah was using exaggeration as a device to point out that HTTP is indeed very
awesome for many reasons including tooling, firewall "support" (hehe) and many more.
True. Though, it has also lead to (IMHO) abortions such as SOAP - which
Dave Winer initially wrote as a way to use HTTP to tunnel traffic
through firewalls.
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In<fnord> practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
