RE: SOAP breaks HTTP?

• From: Henrik Frystyk Nielsen <henrikn@microsoft.com>
• Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 09:18:26 -0800
• To: "Mark Baker" <distobj@acm.org>
• Cc: "Tim Bray" <tbray@textuality.com>, <www-tag@w3.org>
• Message-ID: <79107D208BA38C45A4E45F62673A434D06DEE393@red-msg-07.redmond.corp.microsoft.com>

>But the issue is *common practice* and *expectations* on the part of
>developers.  The vast majority of them, when sitting down to code with
>SOAP, will break HTTP, because their expectations are that SOAP is an
>RPC protocol.  On the other hand, the majority (probably not "vast"
>though 8-) of those sitting down to code with HTTP, will not 
>break HTTP.

I think the basic difference is that while HTTP is able to actually
perform tasks (GET, etc.), SOAP really isn't. Fundamentally SOAP doesn't
do anything but leaves most to be defined thorough extensions. As you
know, there are already various examples of proposed extensions that can
provide highly message-based functionality and effectively turns SOAP
into a real protocol but these things take time. As a result it is not
surprising that we see its uses in flux.

Henrik

Received on Tuesday, 26 March 2002 12:18:27 UTC