It seems the Web Service Description WG has opted not to bother trying to fix a glaring architectural flaw in Web services by maintaining the status quo of making it impossible to determine which operation is being requested for any particular (or even a reasonably sized subset of) SOAP messages. Bah.

The issue behind this problem is that the so-called “document exchange” model used by Web services is little more than wishful thinking; If only we hid the operation from the message, then we’d be more loosely coupled, yeah, that’s the ticket!. Sorry folks, it just don’t work like that. What you’ve done by removing the operation is just to make your message less self-descriptive. That’s it. The only gain is saving a few bytes.

If there’s anything worse than RPC, it’s less self-descriptive RPC.

The easiest way that we know to go about “doing away with operations”, is to just give every component the same set of operations. Then you don’t really need to think about them much of the time.

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