I’m in the middle (or perhaps its the end) of a conversation with Savas Parastatidis regarding a “radical” new form of Web service constraint. Consider his plan to send along this as a message;

<orderForm1>
  <carOrMotorcycle>car</carOrMotorcycle>
  <colour>blue</colour>
  <cc>1800</cc>
  <model>blabla</model>
</orderForm1>

Sure, there’s no symbol visible that can be mapped to an operation, but in order to understand what is being asked of a recipient of that message, something somewhere has to say what is being asked. Otherwise it would inherit the semantics of any underlying application protocol that transferred it – consider that it would mean different things to send it with HTTP PUT and POST – and therefore wouldn’t really be a message, just a piece of a message (representation anyone?).

Based on what Savas explains he wants that message to mean though, what he describes is semantically equivalent to HTTP POST, only without URI targetting, and with an implicit operation rather than an explicit one. I claim that this is a better version of his message;

POST some-uri HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/order-form+xml
<orderForm1>
  <carOrMotorcycle>car<carOrMotorcycle>
  <colour>blue<colour>
  <cc>1800<cc>
  <model>blabla<model>
<orderForm1>

It’s pretty funny to see pieces of Web architecture being rediscovered by Web services folks. Once the enormity of the big picture of the Web hits home with them, well … let’s just say that there’s a whole lot of walls on which I’d love to be a fly.

P.S. more uniform interface goodness from Bill.

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