Web-friendly SOAP

Thank you for your attention to web-friendly SOAP.

I feel that the SOAP specifications should call particular attention to
an aspect of Web Architecture which is commonly misunderstood by web
services creators. This is especially true for the Primer which will
give programmers a flavour of SOAP usage. I propose:

"One of the principles of Web Architecture is that all important
resources should be identified by URIs. This implies that most SOAP
services will have many endpoints and that SOAP services that create and
destroy resources (e.g. purchase orders, calendars) will also create and
destroy endpoints."

It is my personal sense that giving URIs to resources is not a large
burden and will greatly improve the interoperability of web services.
Unfortunately this is quite difficult with today's SOAP toolkits. This
is understandable because the original "SOAP style" was not based upon
web architecture principles. Now that we are trying to move SOAP into
accordance with web architecture I think we need to point out areas
where the installed toolkit base is out of sync.

I would like to see future SOAP toolkits have first-class support for
mapping logical objects to URIs as HTTP toolkits do.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Friday, 14 June 2002 06:25:17 UTC