Hi all,
I've been building a TinkerPop 4 server (https://github.com/bodar/mogwai-db/)
and hit a rough edge in the HTTP protocol I'd like to float.
Today a request carries everything in the body — the Gremlin string,
bindings, and the traversal-source name (g) that selects the target graph —
against a single endpoint path. That works end-to-end, but the only thing
identifying the target graph lives inside the payload.
The friction: proxies, gateways, and CDNs route on method + URL + headers,
never the body. So routing by target graph (multi-tenant sharding,
per-graph auth, rate limiting, metrics) means buffering and parsing the
body to extract g — a binary parse at the edge with GraphBinary, which is
exactly what a proxy shouldn't be doing, and in some setups isn't possible
at all.
Proposal: allow the traversal source in the URL path — e.g. POST
/gremlin/{g} — as an equivalent to sending g in the body. The body form
stays for full backwards compatibility; a path segment simply takes
precedence. Ideally the GLVs would default to the path form so the
ecosystem becomes proxy-routable out of the box.
It's a small, backwards-compatible change that would make TinkerPop servers
far easier to run behind standard infrastructure. I've implemented the path
form in my own server and it's been a clear win.
Is this something the project would be open to discussing? If there's
appetite, I'm happy to create Jira / PR as needed.
Thanks,
Dan
