Re: RPC in WSA?

"Paul Denning" <pauld@mitre.org> writes:
>
> Martin has an action item from the 2003-08-7 telecon, but I thought I
would
> prime the pump with some thoughts I had during the telecon.
>
> Given that WSDWG seems to be taking the notion of RPC (or the ability to
> describe RPC) out of WSDL, we need to figure out a few things.

I disagree totally.

WSDL's abstract part never had the notion of RPC. What it had always
was the notion of a one way message or a request-response pattern of
messages. The SOAP *binding* is the only thing that used the word "rpc"
and that was used to mean "apply the rules of SOAP RPC as indicated
in section 7 of SOAP 1.1 to generate a wrapper element for the <part>s
of the message."

I don't believe the direction of the WS-Desc WG has changed these
fundamental concepts. What we have indeed decided is not to have the
binding rule for auto generating a wrapper, but the message exchange
patterns are still there and still the same (and much more powerful
for extensibility).

> 1.  What should WSAWG say about RPC?
> 2.  Where in the WSA stack diagram would RPC fit?
> 3.  If I wanted to describe an RPC web service, how do I describe it?
> 4.  Is RPC a higher layer thing that Choreography should describe?
> 5.  Is RPC a lower layer thing that currenty has no formal description
> language?
> 6.  Is RPC a "feature" [1]?
> 7.  Should RPC be included in the Message Oriented Model [2]?
> 8.  Should description of RPC be a WSDL extension?

IMO WS-A should talk about message exchange patterns as described in
WSDL and not about RPC directly. RPC's can indeed be modeled by WSDL.next
just fine as a request-response (or input-output, whatever the thing is
called today) MEP and thus that's all WS-A needs to consider.

YMMV. ;-)

Sanjiva.

Received on Thursday, 7 August 2003 23:37:21 UTC