Paul,
Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful reply.
Paul Davis wrote:
The biggest thing that an HTTP replicator has going for it is its
simplicity. The entire protocol can be summed up in as little as "open
an HTTP connection, stream documents edited after the last
replication."
Unfortunately, not so simple for someone who wants to deploy lots of nodes.
Switching the replicator to a more advanced protocol I think isn't
really in the cards for the problem that the current replication
scheme is meant to solve. I think that implementing a solution that
uses P2P/UUCP/multicast discovery would be an awesome feature, but not
something I would see going into the 'core' CouchDB distribution until
someone steps up with a long term commitment to supporting it.
I keep looking at doing something like this. Unfortunately, I lost the
funding source that I thought was going to pay for my time, sigh...
Whether the replicator breaks HTTP is rather more of a philosophical
debate best left for when I've had a few beers. I don't discount your
points that SOAP/XML-RPC suck hard, but I don't think they have any
bearing on the replication protocol given how its implemented.
Not so much that it breaks HTTP, as that HTTP imposes some serious
constraints on the replication approach that other protocols don't
Thanks again,
Miles
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In<fnord> practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
