Re: Request from the ATF team to the authors of the WSDL Part II Spec

Steve et al,

I said I would try to provide comments on your document[1]. I have not 
followed the ATF's work too closely, and apologize in advance if I am 
completely off the track.

First, a high level comment. I note there is no support for attributes 
as such in SOAP (or HTTP). I assume attributes would be returned as a 
(fragment) XML document, possibly in the body of a SOAP (or HTTP) 
message. This raises the question: can attributes (+values) be seen as 
an XML document, just like an SNMP MIB can (after conversion)? If it 
can, doesn't the problem become: a) being able to describe an XML 
document; and b) being able to query that document? If so, shouldn't we 
  leverage technologies such as XQuery and XPath, rather than inventing 
our own extension?

Now down to your specific question: how does this fit into a WSDL 
binding? I am under the impression that this is not covered (yet) by 
your document. Section "Accessing Attributes" describes the wire syntax 
for SOAP and HTTP "attribute getting and setting" messages, but it does 
not actually indicate how this wire syntax is 
modelled/described/represented in WSDL. I think it should. (BTW, if we 
decide to publish your work in its current form, I think we would need 
to prepare a companion SOAP spec, that describes your SOAP encoding for 
attributes.)

To cover the SOAP/HTTP serialization you are suggesting, wouldn't we 
have to introduce a new mode, in addition to the existing literal and 
rpc modes?

Also, I am wondering why you are not envisaging setting/getting several 
attributes at once.

I realize I have not followed the ATF's work too closely; you may have 
answered these sorts of questions already; as said earlier, I apologize 
in advance if I am completely off topic.

Jean-Jacques.

[1] 
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-ws-desc-state/2003Sep/0000.html>

Steve Graham wrote:

> Jean-Jacques/Jeffrey:
> In today's teleconference of the Attributes Task Force, we agreed to
> request preliminary review of the updated ATF report [.1] from the authors
> of the WSDL Part II spec. Since the major changes in this draft relates to
> the way we propose that interface/attribute elements are interpreted in the
> binding, your thoughts would be very valuable in our work.
> 
> If possible, we would also request that you attend our ATF telecon on
> Monday, Sept 15 (12-1 EST) to discuss your thoughts. [.2]. Please let us
> know if you are willing to take the time to review this document and/or
> attend our next telecon.
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> sgg
> 
> [.1]http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-ws-desc/2003Sep/0011.html
> [.2]http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-ws-desc-state/2003Sep/0000.html
> 
> ++++++++
> Steve Graham
> sggraham@us.ibm.com
> (919)254-0615 (T/L 444)
> STSM, On Demand Architecture
> ++++++++
>

Received on Friday, 19 September 2003 09:59:05 UTC