RFC 2244 (rfc2244) - Page 2 of 68
ACAP -- Application Configuration Access Protocol
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 2244 ACAP November 1997 ACAP is designed to operate well with a client that only has intermittent access to an ACAP server. For this reason, each entry has a server maintained modification time so that the client may detect changes. In addition, the client may ask the server for a list of entries which have been removed since it last accessed the server. ACAP presumes that a dataset may be potentially large and/or the client's network connection may be slow, and thus offers server sorting, selective fetching and change notification for entries within a dataset. As required for most Internet protocols, security, scalability and internationalization were important design goals. Given these design goals, an attempt was made to keep ACAP as simple as possible. It is a traditional Internet text based protocol which massively simplifies protocol debugging. It was designed based on the successful IMAP [IMAP4] protocol framework, with a few refinements. 1.4. Validation By default, any value may be stored in any attribute for which the user has appropriate permission and quota. This rule is necessary to allow the addition of new simple dataset classes without reconfiguring or upgrading the server. In some cases, such as when the value has special meaning to the server, it is useful to have the server enforce validation by returning the INVALID response code to a STORE command. These cases MUST be explicitly identified in the dataset class specification which SHOULD include specific fixed rules for validation. Since a given ACAP server may be unaware of any particular dataset class specification, clients MUST NOT depend on the presence of enforced validation on the server. 1.5. Definitions access control list (ACL) A set of identifier, rights pairs associated with an object. An ACL is used to determine which operations a user is permitted to perform on that object. See section 3.5. attribute A named value within an entry. See section 3.1. Newman & Myers Standards Track
