Rails - Jan 2005 - HTTP Header RPC

I had this really odd thought that it might be possible to do a decent
RPC setup using only the HTTP headers of a request.  They are there for
meta-data anyway, and any unknown ones are ignored.  I gave it a try and
was able to get decent responses from both sides.  It seems rather
lightweight and good enough for most quick requests.  It''s kind of like
a weird one use shared hashtable.

Question is, how many things would this screw up?  It''s part of the
standard that you can add headers if you place an X- in front.  Anyone
have ideas as to the usefulness of this approach? My gut reaction says
it''s going to interfere with some of the load balancers and defense
mechanisms.

-- 
Zed A. Shaw
http://www.zedshaw.com/

> Anyone have ideas as to the usefulness of this approach? My gut 
> reaction says
> it''s going to interfere with some of the load balancers and
defense
> mechanisms.
What''s the reason you''re not interested in using standard REST
or
SOAP/XML-RPC? Do you have extreme performance concerns?

Of course, doing it just for fun is also a very valid reason.
--
David Heinemeier Hansson,
http://www.basecamphq.com/   -- Web-based Project Management
http://www.rubyonrails.org/  -- Web-application framework for Ruby
http://macromates.com/       -- TextMate: Code and markup editor (OS X)
http://www.loudthinking.com/ -- Broadcasting Brain