Hi Kurt (and sorry about my typo, Jeni)
Kurt Cagle wrote:
I'd second Francis's note on the idempotency issue. Consider the canonical
HTTP GET based web service - the stock market ticker. Such a service will be
returning a different result set at any given moment in time, to an extent
that you could effectively argue that time itself becomes a parameter in any
such service, regardless of the specific implementation. My experience with
web services is that most meaningful web service results vary with time.
Now I'm going to play devil's advocate - could you not say that it is
realistic to think as something like a stock-market ticker as being
idempotent *during the execution* of a single transform?
But - hopping neatly back to my normal side of the barricade - I'd
absolutely stick up for random numbers, timestamps and serial interfaces
to and from large data sets as examples of interesting and sometimes
important non-idempotent features.
Francis.
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