- From: Ugo Corda <UCorda@SeeBeyond.com>
- Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 09:27:30 -0700
- To: "Mike Champion" <mike.champion@softwareag-usa.com>, <www-ws-arch@w3.org>
> While very simple information transfer > services can be implemented without it, secure, reliable, multi-part, > multi-party and/or multi-network applications will require some > standardized way of packaging and annotating messages so that > "intermediaries" can provide authentication, encryption, access control, > transaction processing, routing, delivery confirmation, etc. services at > the infrastructure level rather than forcing the producer and consumer to > handle all these features. SOAP's envelope (and attachment) structure and > its processing model have proven to be a very robust and powerful framework > within which to do this. The statement seems to imply that the importance of SOAP's envelope and processing model is limited to cases where intermediaries are present. I think their importance stands by itself and does not depend on the existence of intermediaries (e.g. the envelope carries information that many transports would not be able to handle). In fact, my impression is that so far the area of intermediaries has been investigated very little beyond what the SOAP processing model says. As far as I know, most of the new specs currently being worked on (security, reliability, choreography, transaction, etc.) say very little or nothing at all about intermediaries so far. Ugo
Received on Thursday, 1 May 2003 12:27:41 UTC