RE: Web Service Object Support

Roger,
Operation overloading has been disallowed in WSDL 1.2. You can read the
discussions and rationale on the public WSDL list.
For what concerns WSDL 1.1, the WS-I Basic Profile also disallows operator
overloading.
 
Ugo

-----Original Message-----
From: Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler) [mailto:RogerCutler@ChevronTexaco.com]
Sent: Saturday, October 05, 2002 10:28 AM
To: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: Web Service Object Support



I have a question that I think is about web services architecture.  Let me
first state what I think the situation is and then ask the question.  If
this is a relevant question I suspect that the folks on this list may be
able to recast it to be more meaningful.

 *** The Situation (I think?) *** 

I think that WSDL does not explicitly expose objects on the web.  One could
imagine a web service protocol (which might be part of a web services
architecture??) that does this, but WSDL is not it.  There is nothing in
WSDL, for example, that explicitly or even implicitly supports "Dog and Cat
interfaces implement the Animal interface".  Moreover, WSDL does not
explicitly support recognizing the following three calls and sending them to
different methods appropriately:

Foo(int) 
Foo(int, int) 
Foo(float) 

Now I know someone who thinks he's seen the first two implemented in .Net
and I find this very believable.  I'd even think it conceivable that the
third might work, although doing so would be quite tricky.  But making the
Foo's work depends on the implementation, not design features in WSDL, so
interoperability depends on implementation -- which experience shows has
been quite variable.  I think it's quite possible that however .Net does the
first two might also work on other platforms, since most implementations are
on platforms that support that kind of overloading, but if you wanted to
depend on it you'd have to find out specifically, and that kind of question
is not real easy to get answered.

 *** The Question *** 

If the above observations are more or less correct, does it make any sense
to treat the possibility of exposing objects via web services in the web
services architecture?