Monthly Archives: October 2002

Dave Winer’s SOAP definition

Dave made the following suggestion for a SOAP definition; It’s a simple way to call procedures running on other machines, on other OSes, written in other languages, using different economic systems, without being forced to pay a tax to Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Sun or the W3C. SOAP isn’t that at all. That’s XML-RPC. Dave’s a… Read More »

What is a Message?

A couple of recent blogs and messages I’ve seen prompted me to write this. They both suggest that a “SOAP message” is necessarily a “message”. I disagree. When bound to an application protocol, a SOAP message/envelope is not a message because it doesn’t contain the necessary information with which to understand what it means. For… Read More »

Does REST need WSDL?

Peter Drayton writes that some folks have had “RESTian awakenings” as a result of his presentation, which is just awesome. While reading up on one of his references though, I found this in Alexis Smirnov’s blog which suggests that at least some people still have a ways to go; After his talk, Peter, Tim and… Read More »

Waste Services Inc.

A little silliness on a Monday morning (aka garbage day). Here in Ottawa, WSI is our local waste management company.

What’s Next for Browsers?

Paul writes that innovation in the browser ain’t dead yet. I agree. From a distributed systems POV, I think there’s two important things that need to happen to the browser, in addition to the richer languages that Paul talks about (and don’t forget about RDF and OWL!); making the browser a peer allowing the browser… Read More »

WS-I Publishes Basic Profile Draft

WS-I released the first draft of the Basic Profile today. I don’t know how they manage to write so much about something that isn’t necessary; you wouldn’t need profiles if interoperability were well defined. It seems to be purely a political move to bundle specs together so that the technology doesn’t look like it could… Read More »

Axis gets GET support

Sam writes that Glen Daniels has added HTTP GET support to Axis. Good job! Though I think my suggestion was cleaner, lined up well (semantically) with how other methods are invoked, and didn’t require that odd hack which suggests that a GET request is not a request message(!). Oh well. Thanks, Glen.

The Web as an Exercise in Generalization

A message I sent to www-ws-arch this past summer seems to be making the rounds again. I don’t think I ever mentioned it in my weblog, so here ya go. Looks like it was mentioned on xml-dev, so perhaps that’s why. Er, and I forgot that I mentioned it in my “Playing Checkers with a… Read More »

Fun with viruses

Presumably a virus/worm/whatever had a hand in a message forwarded to the Web Services Architecture WG mailing list today. Interesting, it appears as though Scott Dietzen, CTO at BEA, has moved on to Microsoft. Ow, that’s gotta hurt. 8-) Who knows though, this could be a fake, since the message headers look weird; the message-id… Read More »