Support for application protocols

Greetings,

I just checked the new bindings draft and noticed that no progress has
yet been made on section 3, which is unfortunate from my POV, because
I consider it deficient in a very important way that would ideally be
dealt with up front, as it would certainly impact other parts of the
spec.  FWIW, this is why I raised issue 64[1].

The subject of this message is "Support for application protocols",
which is what section 3 currently doesn't have; it doesn't distinguish
between application protocols and transport protocols, thereby treating
application protocols *as* transport protocols, which they are not.

To remedy this problem, I propose the following.

First, the renaming of the "transport" attribute on the "binding"
element to "protocol", to reflect that more than just transport
protocols will be supported.

Second, an additional parameter on the "binding" element called "type"
which can have two possible values (for now); "transport" or
"application".  Alternately, URIs for those values would be fine.  The
default value would be "transport", since this reflects common practice
with the use of application protocols by Web services.

There are (at least) two ways of doing the core of the change I'm
presenting here.  One way would be to remove the need for an operation
element in the case where "type" had value "application", which would
permit the methods/"verbs" of the application protocol to be exposed as
the operation.  The other way would be to define the methods as
operations in the binding.  Potato, potatoe.  Either way's ok with me,
as is any other solution that recognizes that "application protocol
method = WSDL operation"

And of course, should "type" have the value of "transport", even if the
protocol being used is an application protocol, then it's back to the
same use of WSDL that you're all familiar with.

BTW, this has the added benefit of providing you a solution for
supporting the SOAP 1.2 "Web Method" feature, as the "Web method" in use
would be exposed as a WSDL operation.

Thanks!

 [1] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2002/ws/desc/issues/wsd-issues.html#x64

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis

Received on Friday, 24 January 2003 13:44:21 UTC