RE: WS-I and RPC

>>>Pretty much every use of SOAP is what I call "RPC", in that developers
define the network interface, rather than reusing the network interface
provided for them by application protocols.<<<

Not true - look at ebXML which is based on SOAP and is already widely
deployed. In this case the interface is often defined completely separately
from the developers who exchange XML inside SOAP where the XML often
contains a hundred (or more) data items.

David

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org]
Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2003 8:29 PM
To: Ugo Corda
Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: WS-I and RPC



On Sun, Jan 05, 2003 at 08:14:23PM -0800, Ugo Corda wrote:
> 
> > You seem to be beating on the RPC strawman, even after the 
> > WS-I has declared him legally dead :-) 
> 
> This is not exactly correct. What the WS-I Basic Profile has ruled out is
RPC with SOAP Encoding (Chapt. 5 of SOAP 1.1). Literal RPC is still part of
the Basic Profile.
> 
> Recently there were discussions to drop the RPC style entirely from the
Basic Profile (which I would have been in favor of), but it was rejected
since many people considered that too big a change this late in the game.

Pretty much every use of SOAP is what I call "RPC", in that developers
define the network interface, rather than reusing the network interface
provided for them by application protocols.

So until Web services folk stop putting methods in the SOAP body when
transferring messages over application protocols, I won't be happy.

As Roy says;

"In order for SOAP-ng to succeed as a Web protocol, it needs to start
behaving like it is part of the Web. That means, among other things,
that it should stop trying to encapsulate all sorts of actions under an
object-specific interface."
 -- http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Apr/0181

FWIW, SOAP 1.1 and 1.2 are "SOAP-ng" - but people still use them like
they're SOAP 1.0, which isn't.  Roy's comments were more an indictment
of current practice than the specs themselves.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis

Received on Monday, 6 January 2003 12:54:55 UTC