{"id":507,"date":"2004-10-27T10:29:00","date_gmt":"2004-10-27T14:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/wp\/2004\/10\/27\/self-description-and-protocol-independence\/"},"modified":"2004-10-27T10:29:00","modified_gmt":"2004-10-27T14:29:00","slug":"self-description-and-protocol-independence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/2004\/10\/self-description-and-protocol-independence\/","title":{"rendered":"Self-description and protocol independence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve promptly follows up<\/a>. In response to my comments about self-description, he writes;<\/p>\n\n

\nReading 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.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

I was just pointing out that the envelope he described would not, in fact,\nbe self-descriptive. There are many possible implications of this depending\nupon your POV, but yes, in (my view of) Steve’s view of the stack, SOAP should have a\ndependency on WS-Addressing, and should have defined the equivalent of wsa:Action.\nIn my view of the stack, it should not have, and in fact there should be no\nWS-Addressing because application protocols already provide their own addressing\nmechanism.<\/p>\n\n

And a slight historical correction; “TCP” circa 1974 was in fact the functional\nequivalent of TCP\/IP, with the two layers munged into one. “The Split” into\nseparate specs and layers\noccurred in 1978<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

\nI absolutely would consider being independent of WS-Transfer a good thing, if my applications hard dependency on the protocol was making it really hard to accommodate the new requirements I wanted to satisfy.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

How?!?!?! WS-Transfer provides the application semantics that an app\nis hardcoded to use, just as a stock quote app would be hard coded to use\ngetStockQuote. You can’t just swap in WS-Notification, IMAP, POP3, or any\nother application protocol and expect the app to work the same, because\nthey provide different application semantics<\/em>!!<\/p>\n\n

You can’t escape it; protocol dependence is a necessity, since protocols\nare the basis of all interoperability. Show me a working Web service, and\nI’ll show you where it’s protocol dependent.<\/p>\n\n

This is the fundamental misunderstanding of Web services, and IMO what’s\npreventing a majority of Web services proponents from realizing that the Web\nis what they’ve been looking for all along.<\/p>\n\n

\nI think that’s where we are with HTTP right now – it works in the simple case, but there’s all this other stuff we want to be able to do (security, transactions, duplex communication, end-to-end reliability, etc). Mapping all that stuff into HTTP is turning out to be counterproductive and quite hard. However, those problems are tractable if we assume an infoset-centric view of the world. When the status quo doesn’t work any more and something better is available, it’s time to change the status quo.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

The status quo works just fine. I hear folks make the claim to the contrary all\nthe time, but have yet to see an example of a Web service that couldn’t be done in\nan all ’round superior manner using HTTP and URIs. I’m not claiming that an example\ncan’t be found, only that there just aren’t that many, at least once you’ve chosen to\nuse coarse grained, document based messaging.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-soap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}