RE: SOAP and the Web architecture

Paul wrote:
>Rich Salz wrote:
>> 
>> Modulo Larry's note about "don't rehash; send links", I really do not
>> understand the objection:
>> 
>> > The gist of the problem is that the current HTTP binding uses HTTP POST
>> > requests.
>> 
>> IS there a fundamental difference between sending a soap message and
>> sending form data?  If so, what is it?
>
>One difference is that when I build an HTML form I have a choice of GET
>or POST. Google uses GET. Babelfish uses POST. In fact I believe that
>GET is the default.
>
>Will SOAP allow me to choose? Also, I'd really appreciate it if SOAP
>would allow me to choose how much or how little to put in the URL-line
>instead of in the message body. But that implies a tighter binding
>between SOAP and HTTP than just using HTTP as a more or less invisible
>transport.

While in practice nearly anything may be possible, realistically you can't
send anything in a GET, except a URL and CGI.  You can't send XML in GET.
For GET you don't specify a content-type (because there is no content) so
you wouldn't know the type of data that is sent.  Also you can't have
newlines in a GET.  I suppose that you could assume a certain content-type
(XML) and encode the whole XML file as CGI and in theory that might work.
But I think that really would be a perversion and if the file were large I
would guess that many servers would have trouble with it.

Matthew Jones
mjones@netsilicon.com

Received on Monday, 27 August 2001 15:48:22 UTC