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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-2052?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13894639#comment-13894639
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Benjamin Young commented on COUCHDB-2052:
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[~benoitc] by using URI (and not URL) in your comment above, you prove the
point. :) URI's are just identifiers. They can be relative, absolute, and even
non-dereferencable (if you want to go there...).
To your point about protocols. It can be a tangled word. CouchDB (et al) use
HTTP for their protocol. Anything we do inside or on top of that could be
considered a protocol as well, but that starts to tangle things up a bit.
We'll be best served if we "cut with the grain" of the web and use the pieces
as they were designed: URI's, HTTP methods, media types, etc.
Feature and capability aren't new territory. We'd be best served by "rinsing
and repeating" some proven method of scalable resource discover-ability...like
the Web. :)
> Add API for discovering feature availability
> --------------------------------------------
>
> Key: COUCHDB-2052
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-2052
> Project: CouchDB
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Security Level: public(Regular issues)
> Components: HTTP Interface
> Reporter: Jens Alfke
>
> I propose adding to the response of "GET /" a property called "features" or
> "extensions" whose value is an array of strings, each string being an
> agreed-upon identifier of a specific optional feature. For example:
> {"couchdb": "welcome", "features": ["_bulk_get", "persona"]}, "vendor":
> …
> Rationale:
> Features are being added to CouchDB over time, plug-ins may add features, and
> there are compatible servers that may have nonstandard features (like
> _bulk_get). But there isn't a clear way for a client (which might be another
> server's replicator) to determine what features a server has. Currently a
> client looking at the response of a GET / has to figure out what server and
> version thereof it's talking to, and then has to consult hardcoded knowledge
> that version X of server Y supports feature Z.
> (True, you can often get away without needing to check, by assuming a feature
> exists but falling back to standard behavior if you get an error. But not all
> features may be so easy to detect — the behavior of an unaware server might
> be to ignore the feature and do the wrong thing, rather than returning an
> error — and anyway this adds extra round-trips that slow down the operation.)
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