RE: open transport protocol for aysnc web services?

Hi Nick

Although there certainly are similarities between SOAP-RP and BEEP, I
actually see them as being quite different in their scope and what they
do. 

SOAP-RP is a stateless, message oriented mechanism for exchanging
messages along message paths using any message pattern. One of the big
differences to me is that I in SOAP-RP can address intermediaries and
have them perform tasks - in other words provide a decentralized
processing mechanism. This is useful in scenarios where you want to role
out web services as value add services.

On the other hand I would categorize BEEP as a connection-oriented
hop-by-hop protocol with some notion of message exchange patterns like
request/response, for example, although it doesn't actually define an
application.

>Thanks for the info.  I read through the SOAP-RP spec and it 
>looks promising.  I was wondering how you view it vis-a-vis 
>BEEP?  SOAP-RP seems to handle routing information plus 
>low-level transport with its TCP and UDP bindings while BEEP 
>seems to be geared as a framework for building async 
>application protocols (not necessarily tied to web services).  
>Is this a fair assesment?  Both protocols seems to provide a 
>lot of the same functionality but take different approaches.

Henrik Frystyk Nielsen
mailto:henrikn@microsoft.com