RE: Issue 5; GET vs GetLastTradePrice

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Walden Mathews [mailto:waldenm@optonline.net]
> Sent: Thursday, January 02, 2003 10:37 AM
> To: Newcomer, Eric
> Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Issue 5; GET vs GetLastTradePrice
> 
> I'd like to get clearer on what that middle ground is.  Last 
> summer I got involved in a project that
> had already decided to use XML in a "document" mode as 
> opposed to a "RPC" mode, but the
> distinction was only skin deep, at least according to my 
> analysis. 

I sometimes suspect that too.  As someone said in one of these recent
threads, it would be hard to distinguish an instance of one from the other
using a protocol analyzer. The distinctions do seem more at the design
pattern level-- do you CONCEIVE of the message as a method invocation with
arguments that gets directly mapped onto a procedure call of some sort, or
do you conceive of it as a business document to be acted on by some
intermediate software that interprets the data and indirectly invokes the
back-end software.  

I'm  seeing this more and more as an engineering question of finding the
optimal degree of coupling in a particular web application than as some huge
meta-question of competing paradigms. The tighter coupling of direct mapping
of method invocations (synchronous or asynchronous) on one system to another
via SOAP messages makes sense in stable, well-managed systems where
performance considerations are paramount; the looser coupling of business
document exchange makes sense in more dynamic, hapharzardly managed systems
where ease of discovery by new "customers" is more important than
performance for existing customers.

Received on Thursday, 2 January 2003 11:42:01 UTC