AtomPub Multipart Media Creation Internet-Draft

Posted by Joe Gregorio, Google Data APIs Team

We've always intended for the Google Data APIs to be open and reusable, and today we took yet another step in that direction. Back in April we extended a very liberal patent license to all of our extensions and now we're taking another step and have published one of our extensions in the form of an internet-draft. The extension deals with uploading both a picture and the meta-data about that picture, such as the title, in one request, as opposed to the two requests that would be required in a vanilla AtomPub implementation. This extension is a feature we first introduced in the Picasa Web Albums Data API.

Publishing an extension as as internet-draft does not mean it is a standard. An internet-draft is the way of starting a conversation in the IETF, a small initial step on the way to standardization. See the IETF's Guidelines to Authors of Internet-Drafts for all the details.

If the AtomPub community sees value in this extension and wants to standardize it, we will support that effort and participate. If it becomes standardized, we will endeavor to update our implementation to match that standard. This is just one small extension Google has for the Atom Publishing Protocol and we will be documenting more extensions in the future as time permits.

Discussion of this internet-draft should take place on the atom-protocol mailing list.