SOAP concerns

I recieved this email questioning the value of SOAP.

Hi Folks,

Some concerns that I have with SOAP ...

I have taken a look at the latest draft of SOAP.  As far as I can tell,
SOAP now defines a shell into which you can put anything.  No semantics
are defined for any of the elements.  For example, the Body element is
defined to contain zero or more children.  That's the extent of their
definition of the Body element!  This is useless.  This leaves
implementors clueless of what to do with the contents of a Body
element.  Worse, it leaves every implementor free to do anything they
want.  This makes all SOAP implementations non-interoperable.

I am all in favor of extensible schemas, but you've got to first have
something concrete to extend.

At this time I am hard pressed to see any utility for SOAP.  Why would I

use something that is devoid of substance, when I can already implement
(HTML) text-based Web services using Java Servlets, CGI, JSP, APS, etc?

Just a few thoughts...  Your comments are eagerly welcome.

Received on Thursday, 11 October 2001 07:51:01 UTC