[whenToUseGet] PUT/POST & GET with SOAP

I've taken a look at the latest draft of:  "URIs, Addressability, and the 
use of HTTP GET and POST".[1]  Overall, I think it's really excellent.  A 
couple of suggestions:

* The "Ongoing work on GET in Web Services" section [2] has a good 
reference to the SOAP support for RPC with GET, but you might also want to 
link [3], which describes SOAP's WebMethod feature.  As you may be aware, 
use of any flavor of RPC is optional in SOAP.  Various alternatives are 
possible, and a "document" style is commonly employed.  The WebMethod 
feature, which is supported by the normative SOAP HTTP binding[4], allows 
get to be used with any type of SOAP traffic, whether RPC or not.  I 
expect and hope that many non-RPC users of SOAP will avail themselves of 
the opportunity to name resources with URIs, and to use get when 
appropriate.

* At several points the draft recommends using POST, but never PUT, 
implying that perhaps use of PUT is always inappropriate.  As I suggested 
in [4], there may be an opportunity to do some detailed and valuable 
clarification on the PUT/POST distinction.  At the very least, it would 
seem appropriate to indicate that PUT or POST should be used as 
appropriate, perhaps just referring the reader back to RFC 2396 for 
details?

Thank you.  BTW:  these are my personal comments, not sent on behalf of 
the protocols WG.  Again, I think this is overall a terrific job!

Noah


[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/whenToUseGet.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/whenToUseGet.html#webservices
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/PR-soap12-part2-20030507/#WebMethodFeature
[4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003May/0041.html

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Noah Mendelsohn                              Voice: 1-617-693-4036
IBM Corporation                                Fax: 1-617-693-8676
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Received on Monday, 12 May 2003 22:54:08 UTC