RE: whenToUseGet-7 Making SOAP Restful

Hi Mark,


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org]
> 
> Hi Stuart,
> 
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2002 at 09:09:46AM +0100, Williams, Stuart wrote:
> > Just a thought anyway... a 'null' SOAP request message as the 'trigger'
to
> > use HTTP GET rather than some other 'magical' incantation. What do you
> > think? Others? Mark B?
> 
> Noah's example was a good one to help illustrate the different ways in
> which one can think of using SOAP, especially as it relates to making
> use of the semantics of application protocols.
> 
> But IMO, trying to build something HTTP-like on top of SOAP, which in
> turn will often be on top of HTTP, is quite impractical and unnecessary.
> It's true that HTTP's extensibility and processing models aren't as rich
> as SOAP's, but also IMO, these small improvements are no where near
> enough to justify the huge cost of deploying such a solution.

Hmmm.... not sure I was trying to build "something HTTP-like" on top of
SOAP. One of the 'complaints' levelled against the current HTTP binding in
the SOAP WDs is there are no circumstances under which it uses HTTP GET. I
was offering a slight modification to Noah's suggestion, which at least to
me, seems to provide a natural way integrate GET into the request-response
MEP. As with Noah's suggestion the burden of generating the request URI
falls on the SOAP application, ie. it doesn't provide a scheme for URI
encoding the contents of a SOAP message...

I was hoping that you might respond along the lines of... that looks
interesting... but apparently not.

> I think that if SOAP has a future on the Web (as opposed to on the
> Internet), it will be with the chameleon use where both SOAP and HTTP
> are used by developers at the same time (though an EDI-like use of SOAP
> over POST is fine, it's a niche).  But I've yet to see a SOAP library
> that supports such a use.

As I have said before, that seems to me very much like treating SOAP as a
media-type and the protocol is then HTTP with representations that just
happen to be contained in SOAP envelope. [Observation, not a complaint].
There would be no need for a SOAP/HTTP binding, GET/PUT/HEAD/DELETE/POST all
available as specified in HTTP. Equally, no sense of an independent
abstraction of what SOAP is.

> MB
> -- 
> Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
> Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.      mbaker@planetfred.com
> http://www.markbaker.ca   http://www.planetfred.com
> 

Regards

Stuart