Tony hits the nail on the head
What is SOAP? It’s an HTTP POST containing XML, and an HTTP response containing XML. You can make an echo server by – here it is – simply serving a static XML file. That’s it. Just put an XML file on your http server and you’re done.
Indeed.
Alternately, if you feel the need, you can POST the content to the echo service. If you want to wrap it in SOAP too, even that’d be fine. Just watch that immediate child of soapenv:Body, because what you ABSOLUTELY do not need, is an “echo operation“. You just need the content to be echoed, and the address of the service; document in, document out.
That’s document exchange. That’s REST.
Can we get some real work done now, please?
Eve concludes an interesting post about DITA with an observation on SOA;
The trend in distributed computing is towards service-oriented architectures (SOAs). Early in the life of this buzzword, some people said it should really be called a document-oriented architecture (except for the unpleasant acronym :-) because it’s really all about document-passing rather than a tightly coupled RPC paradigm, that is, if you want to be successful at reusing the components.
Document passing, yes! Hmm, anybody know of an existing system anyplace that’s good for passing documents around? 8-) 8-(
Dave Winer asks: Let’s make the Google API an open standard.
I like the sentiment, but come on, everybody knows the Google API is, erm, “suboptimal”. 8-) What’s wrong with OpenSearch?