Sean discovers WS-MessageDelivery which triggers him to display a level of frustration that I didn’t expect to see, but that I’m happy about. We need more integration gurus to raise their hands and ask “Hello, what the $%@! are you people doing?!”, in the hope that those building this architecture may stop to take the time to think about what they’ve created and give it the principled architectural examination it requires. Sean writes;
You started at the wrong end of the pipe. SOAP always was and always will be and API-centric worldview. That is not the future. That is the past. Re-implemented badly. Sometimes I wonder. I really do.
I disagree that SOAP requires an API-centric worldview – I battled against enormous odds to ensure SOAP 1.2 didn’t – but I certainly agree that this is how Web services proponents and specs are using the SOAP specs.
On the other hand, to their credit, Web services promoters are trying to distance themselves from APIs. The problem is that they think they’ve done this with “document oriented SOAP” by removing the operation from the message. Unfortunately though, in their architecture, the operation is still in effect, it’s just hidden from the message which actually makes things worse than RPC (in case you wondered if that was possible!).
What Web services need is an architecture based purely on document exchange, not some RPC/document bastard. Luckily, one is readily available.
no comment until now