Monthly Archives: October 2004

The two faces of neutrality

Patrick reminds me how similar the “XML is a universal solution” position is to the that of SOAP as similarly universal. In both cases, the premise is that by being independent of data models (for XML) and application interfaces (for SOAP), broad applicability is achieved. Now contrast this with the Web/Semantic-Web position, that by constructing… Read More »

Protocol independence

The real issue with protocol independence, I believe, is the word “protocol”; that the two camps in this debate – the Web/Internet folks, and the Web services folks – each have their own, quite different, definition of the word. For Web services proponents, “protocol” means one thing and one thing only; a spec whose job… Read More »

Self-description and protocol independence

Steve promptly follows up. In response to my comments about self-description, he writes; Reading over Marks comments, I’m having a hard time determining if this is a technical criticism or more of a complaint about the division of responsibility between the standards. I was just pointing out that the envelope he described would not, in… Read More »

Steve Maine responds

… to my latest. He writes; Given that in Mark’s world a SOAP envelope is not a SOAP message, then I’m assuming that a SOAP message must logically be {SOAP envelope + other stuff}. Considering Mark’s position with respect to REST, I’m assuming that the magical “other stuff” is a resource URI and an HTTP… Read More »

WS-Why

Steve Maine reports on Don Box’s latest presentation that asks a very good question; why? He summarizes; WS-Addressing is something that really should have been included in the original SOAP specification. However, when SOAP was written nobody was really thinking about transports other than HTTP. As a result, pure SOAP relies on the characteristics of… Read More »

What is a WSDL operation?

Jim has published a great article about WSDL – well, modulo the “protocol independence” bit, of course 8-). But I wonder, how many Web services proponents would agree with him? His views have, as I recall, have been rather controversial. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be such a big deal, but from a Web services perspective this… Read More »

Fix the layering first

All this just because the layering got totally screwed up by the broken requirement of protocol independence? Egads. Time to check back with those first principles, me thinks. The SOAP response MEP, though not without problems, at least gets the layering right. And with this same layering, the best that could likely be done for… Read More »