- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 21:52:45 -0500
- To: Jacek Kopecky <jacek@systinet.com>
- Cc: Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>, David Fallside <fallside@us.ibm.com>, Stuart Williams <skw@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, www-ws-arch@w3.org, xml-dist-app@w3.org
Jacek Kopecky asks whether SOAP is fundamentally: >> a) an extension of the web (or HTTP), or Surely not, as all use of HTTP is optional. >> b) an RPC request/response protocol on top of *a transport >> layer*, or >> c) simply a messaging protocol with basically every message >> being one-way (again, on top of a transport layer). I'd say a mix of (b) and (c), but without the RPC. I don't think we can say either one way, or request response. From our spec: "A binding specification MUST enable one or more MEPs. [2]" I think that makes clear that SOAP has an extensible notion of the message pattern. Although I haven't recently reread the entire spec, I believe that (unlike SOAP 1.1) requests/response now appears symmetrically with one way. Bindings may sport either or both, or other patterns instead. The notion of RPC, in the sense of something that looks like and is easily mapped to procedure or method calls with arguments, is no longer mandatory. I think that makes clear that SOAP can no longer be in any sense fundamentally RPC. So I would say SOAP is: "SOAP is an extensible, interoperable foundation on which to create protocols that support a variety of message patterns, using a wide range of underlying protocols to transport information. SOAP includes optional Remote Procedure Call and associated data encoding conventions, which can be used to build SOAP based protocols that are optimized for easy integration with certain programming languages and systems." Or something like that. [1] http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/Group/1/10/11/soap12-part1.html#bindfw [2] http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/Group/1/10/11/soap12-part2.html#soapmep ------------------------------------------------------------------ Noah Mendelsohn Voice: 1-617-693-4036 IBM Corporation Fax: 1-617-693-8676 One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 ------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Tuesday, 26 March 2002 22:14:13 UTC