Inspiration for Batch Requests in OpenSocial from Facebook

[Mark W.]

I was recently having a discussion on batch request support in OpenSocial. The question was asked if we could do something like what Facebook does in their batch request. Specifically, pass the results from one request as a parameter to the next. 

See: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/batch/ ("Specifying dependencies between operations in the request")

I thought we could do this with request parameters, and using the ID/Key, but now I can't seem to find an example that shows that. Is this just wishful thinking on my end?

-Mark W.

[James Snell]

Hmmm... Why? What's the use case?

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[James Snell]

At first blush, I would question whether this is something we want to
encourage. I have some experience exploring http request batching
(http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-snell-http-batch-01.txt) and after
exploring a number of avenues, I decided not to pursue it further for
a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is that this form of
batching, particularly batching that mixes idempotent and
non-idempotent requests and attempts to bind the results of one
batched request to the input of another has many potentially nasty
side effects -- e.g. it kills caching, can have serious security
ramifications, etc. Not to mention the fact that Facebooks approach is
just plain nasty technically (I mean, seriously... wrapping the body
of a post request inside a field in a json document inside a form
post?) Looking through the examples in the FB page, I don't see a
single case that wouldn't be better dealt with through proper resource
modeling.