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On Monday 18 February 2002 12:23 am, Paul Prescod wrote:
> Dave Winer wrote:
> > BTW, last time I checked HTTP was synchronous.
> >
> > Maybe I missed something.
>
> What do you mean by synchronous? Is SMTP asynchronous? If so, so is
> HTTP:
>
> * http://www.prescod.net/asynchhttp.html
In which case, it's just as asynchronous as anything on this Earth. What's a
synchronous protocol, by this definition? CORBA isn't, and neither is ONC RPC
:-)
I'd say that SMTP is asynchronous since the only responses allowed in an SMTP
sending session are immediate handling of certain errors. To actual perform
an entire transaction, a message is sent and a reply received - which occur
in *seperate* SMTP sessions.
In HTTP, you send a request and get back a response in the *same* HTTP
session. That's the synchronicity. Of course you can define the request to
contain a reply address and the response to contain a simple 'received' or
'not received' and make it asynchronous. But it's not intrinsically so;
unless you make that extra effort, it'll be synchronous.
ABS
--
Alaric B. Snell
http://www.alaric-snell.com/ http://RFC.net/ http://www.warhead.org.uk/
Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software
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