- From: Fisher Mark <fisherm@tce.com>
- Date: Wed, 1 May 2002 14:08:57 -0500
- To: www-tag@w3.org
- Message-ID: <A5E22933E3D5D4118FFE00508BF373C7E41167@indyexch28.indy.tce.com>
One nit -- all the emails I've seen on this list assume that SOAP will always use the CGI QUERY_STRING environment variable for parameter passing, making caching and separate URLs for separate services more difficult. I think for many SOAP installations, SOAP could use the PATH_INFO environment variable for specifying which SOAP service is to be invoked. (PATH_INFO could also be used for parameter passing, especially if the parameters map reasonably well into a hierarchical structure -- see below.) Although webservers configured so that any content owner can add/update a CGI should not use PATH_INFO for security reasons (because the associated PATH_TRANSLATED environment variable exposes internal server directories), I think that most SOAP installations (at least for now) will not be on that kind of webserver. For example, you could have: http://gw.tmm.com/soap.pl/password-check for a password checker, http://gw.tmm.com/soap.pl/BOM-flatfile for retrieving flattened Bills of Materials, and http://gw.tmm.com/soap.pl/scm-supplier-whatisnext for a supply chain management vendor query of what to ship next. All of these URLs should be able to respond to a GET with a WSDL description of their service, along with the ability for each of these URLs to be cached and bookmarked. Underneath, the SOAP interface http://gw.tmm.com/soap.pl would centralize all SOAP requests rather than duplicating the interface code for each SOAP service. An example of using PATH_INFO for parameter passing is the interface to our ISO 9001 document management system, where you specify "latest" for latest version of a document: http://eda.tce.com/dms-gw/latest/indysite/procedures/master.doc while you use "2.02" to get V2.02 of a document: http://eda.tce.com/dms-gw/2.02/indysite/procedures/master.doc =============================================== Mark Leighton Fisher fisherm@tce.com Thomson multimedia, Inc. Indianapolis IN "We have tamed lightning and used it to teach sand to think"
Received on Wednesday, 1 May 2002 15:10:05 UTC