RE: Counting noses on "is SOAP and/or WSDL intrinsic to the defin itio n of Web service"

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Champion, Mike [mailto:Mike.Champion@softwareag-usa.com]
> Sent: Sunday, June 01, 2003 12:04 PM
> To: www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: Counting noses on "is SOAP and/or WSDL intrinsic to the
> definitio n of Web service" 
> 
> 
> 
> 

> I'd appreciate hearing from everyone who 
> cares about
> this (and if you want to debate someone else's position, 
> please change the subject line).

My "wearing member hat" vote is +5.  "Web services in scope for the WSA"
need to use rigorously defined protocols and description languages, but I
think there is some flexibility: anything that is XML-based and contains at
least as much information, and is as rigorously defined, as SOAP and WSDL
are acceptable to be considered "Web services."  Thus, I personally think we
should try to capture the SOAP and WSDL conceptual models as normative parts
of WSA, but not insist on them as concrete technologies.  I know that's a
bit vague; it's vague in my mind too!

I could be persuaded to fall back to -5 "XML is the secret sauce", but I
really don't think the photos.yahoo.com thing is a "Web service" for the
purposes of our architecture.  I see it as a glorified screen-scraping
application.  Sure it's a "service offered over the Web" and I wouldn't want
to say "The W3C has decreed that it is not a REAL Web service", but on the
other hand I don't think we could say much that is authoritative about the
WSA if we considered it to be in scope.  Virtually every Web page could be
screen-scraped, and we don't have anything useful to say about such a broad
"architecture."

I could be persuaded to fall back to +10 if that is the consensus and we put
in the necessary weasel words to say something like "the W3C is not saying
that one MUST use SOAP and WSDL to call oneself a Web service, but we are
saying that SOAP and WSDL are necessary constraints for us to say anything
architecturally interesting about Web services."  I could also be persuaded
if it turns out that my understanding of SOAP and WSDL is too narrow and
that there is not much difference between the +5 and the +10 positions,
because SOAP 1.2 and WSDL 1.2 are rich and extensible enough to encompass
things like RESTful and Semantic Web applications.
>

Received on Sunday, 1 June 2003 13:08:55 UTC