RE: Stranger in a Strange Land

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler) [mailto:RogerCutler@ChevronTexaco.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 7:54 PM
To: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: Stranger in a Strange Land



Once again I feel like I am torn between different universes.  It would be a
lot easier for me, and certainly more comfortable, if I spent my all my time
in a single environment where everyone comfortably accepts the same
assumptions and values. 

It's good we have you to keep our butts regularly kicked! We do have a bit
of a vendor orientation here, and we need to keep the customer perspective
in mind.

OK, let's be more specific.  I have learned that a company which I think is
much larger than any represented in the W3C has forced another company that
I think is larger than any in the W3C to accept XML payloads (lots of them)
totally without envelopes.  "I don't need no stinking SOAP".  

They presumably have a reliable messaging infrastructure (or application
code) to report whether messages are successfully delivered, and no
requirements for complex routing, nor for encryption that has to work across
multiple hops (unlike SSL), and no long running stateful interactions (aka
choreographies), and are happy hand-coding their WS invocations rather than
having them generated from the formal description.  That's fine, but the
whole point of what we're doing is to support the people who need the higher
levels of the WS infrastructure.  People who just have a URI and need to get
data from it directly may well not get any advantage from SOAP, but those
who have more complex needs can take advantage of the infrastructure that
SOAP (and WSDL) add.

I think there is something wrong here, folks.  It seems to me that we may be
seeing the beginnings of a market rebellion.   

I don't worry that there is something wrong.  Maybe there's something right,
if people are using the bits of the Web/Webservices corpus that actually
meet their needs as opposed to those that the pundits and marketing folks
say they should use. If the masses want to rebel against the hypemeisters
and marketing weasels, toss a few rocks for me!   But I don't think that Web
services technologies are the enemy here.

 I see the WSA as encompassing everything from simple RESTful XML exchanges
over HTTP to secured, choreographed, reliable transactions over diverse
protocols. We don't talk about the simple stuff much because it's pretty
well defined. My dispute with the RESTifarians is over whether the
"envelope-less" approach will be practical in complex applications, not over
whether the SOAP approach is necessary in simple applications.