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

+10

Hopefully it would limit the amout of abstract discussions and get the group to focus on something actually useful and helpful.

-- Igor Sedukhin .. (igor.sedukhin@ca.com)
-- (631) 342-4325 .. 1 CA Plaza, Islandia, NY 11788


-----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" 





Chris said (and Ugo +1'd)

> And, for the record, I am still very much opposed to any effort to 
> generalize "Web service" for purposes of this architecture document 
> that does not have SOAP and WSDL at its core. IMO, interoperability is 
> why we are doing Web services in the first place, and you cannot 
> achieve interop if there are thirty one flavors of Web service 
> technology stacks.


Since we're proposing text for section 1.5 of the document, and we're doing triage on issues to see how close we are to consensus, let's see where we stand on this one.  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).

Heres's what I would consider to be the range of plausible opinions: (the ordering of some of the options is a bit arbitrary, but try to get into the spirit of the thing here ...)

-10 Neither are necessary; if two machines can agree on how to provide/consume services over the Web, they are doing "Web services."

-5 Neither are necessary, but XML is. It's XML that provides the secret sauce that allows machines to communicate in a standards-based but loosely coupled way over the Web

0  SOAP or WSDL is necessary, it depends on the details of the application

+1 WSDL is necessary, but not SOAP

+2 SOAP is necessary, but not WSDL

+5 Both are necessary "conceptually" but not literally.

+10 Both are necessary, at least as far as the scope of the WSA document 
+is
concerned.

"Mu" [1] would also be an acceptable vote; that would indicate your sense that this scale is meaningless, or orthogonal to your conception of what is important.  I would imagine that Mark B. would be in the "mu" position, but I could be wrong :-)

A few scenarios that might help:

Would something like photos.yahoo.com be a "web service"  if they documented their URLs and POST formats well enough for programmers to use the service? Such a service would allow one to use HTTP POST to put images in a gallery and then, depending on the query parameters in the URI, get them back in
difference sizes, formats, orientations, etc.   If you think this is a Web
service, I think you would vote -10.

Would something like photos.yahoo.com that only worked with SVG images and used XQuery (extended with operations to store data as well as query it) be a "Web service?"  If so, would would probably vote -5

Would the "photos" service sketched out above be a Web service if they ....

- Published either a SOAP or a WSDL interface description?  Vote 0
- Published a WSDL description of how to access the service (with or without SOAP)? Vote +1
- Defined a SOAP interface and documented it with example code? Vote +2
- Published a DAML-S description (or some other formal language description) of both the data formats and protocols needed to access the service?  Vote
+5
- Defined a SOAP interface *and* published a WSDL description of the interface?  Vote +10


[1]"mu means 'no thing'. Like 'quality' it points outside the process of dualistic 
discrimination. mu simply says, 'no class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no'. 
It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in 
error and should not be given. 'Unask the question' is what it says." 
- Robert M. Pirsig from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle 
Maintenance. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0553277472

Received on Tuesday, 3 June 2003 21:03:20 UTC