Subject: Creating a Null-resource

From: Medha Atré <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 10:13:27 +0530

Hello,
I read RFC 2518, but I am not very clear about how to actually create a
Null-Resource using available client APIs like HTTP::WebDAV (Perl) or Neon
(C) ?
Can anybody explain that to me ?

Thanks and Regards.

Medha

---

From: Alan Kent <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 15:43:57 +1000

> Can anybody explain that to me ?

A few people actually dislike the term 'null resource'. There is no
resource of type 'null' that is ever created.  Basically a 'null resource'
means there is no resource. So you cannot create them. Any URI not
currently bound to a resource is said to refer to a 'null resource'.
A better way of describing it is that the URI is unmapped or unbound.

I could imaging the terminology came about from the concept of having a
variable in a programming language of type 'resource' that is null
rather than pointing to a resource object.

Bottom line: there is no API to create null resources because null
resources are not resources. The phase "null resource" really means
"there is no resource".

Alan

ps: I guess you could then argue that DELETE can create null
resources! :-) :-) :-)