- From: Henrik Frystyk Nielsen <henrikn@microsoft.com>
- Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 11:57:10 -0700
- To: "Jeffrey Kay" <jkay@ENGENIA.COM>, "Dick Brooks" <dick@8760.com>, "Martin Gudgin" <marting@develop.com>, "Jake Savin" <jake@userland.com>, "Painter, Philip" <Philip.Painter@compaq.com>, "Daniel Barclay" <Daniel.Barclay@digitalfocus.com>
- Cc: <xml-dist-app@w3.org>
Remember that SOAP is a protocol - it is not a server API which makes SOAP fundamentally different from CGI-scripts, server modules, servlets etc. Comparing SOAP to CGI scripts makes no sense - it would be perfectly legitimate to implement a SOAP processor as a CGI script. This has already been brought up on this thread [10]. It is correct that we don't want implementation details like whether something is implemented using CGI or not to be exposed but again, SOAP is a protocol - it describes a wire format for what a message looks like. HTTP GET requests have the property that *all* parameters are expressed either as part of the URI (after the "?" mark) or within the HTTP header fields. The semantics of GET is not application based - GET is defined by HTTP to mean something very specific namely "give me a representation of yourself". The definition of POST is slightly more complex. What SOAP effectively does is to provide a useful mechanism for describing parameters in XML rather than in HTTP header fields but as it is still an HTTP request, we have to follow HTTP semantics. Note btw that SOAP doesn't require that SOAP requests are followed by responses - the HTTP binding in SOAP says nothing like that. Henrik [10] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/2001Apr/0181.html
Received on Monday, 7 May 2001 15:06:10 UTC