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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org]
> Sent: Sunday, June 08, 2003 10:50 PM
> To: www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Counting noses on "is SOAP and/or WSDL intrinsic to the
> definition of Web service"

> I want to ensure that REST and the Web are accurately represented.

Fully agree!

> So I would hope that we can avoid using adjectives such as "basic", as
> this suggests (to me, at least) that these types of services 
> are somehow
> less capable.  I don't see why we can't just present them as two
> different ways of doing the same thing.

Isn't it accurate to say that they push the responsibility for all the stuff
like reliability, security, correlation, choreography, etc.  [not late
binding, that was put in the previous message wihthout thinking] onto the
application rather than the infrastructure?  For example, reliable
messaging: in REST one gets an error and Just Deals With It, with SOAP this
is potentially an area where the infrastructure can add headers to negotiate
retries and timeouts without the participation of the application
programmer? 

I'm happy to find a better adjective than "minimal" or "basic" but the fact
remains that the HTTP infrastructure doesn't supply as many features as a
SOAP-based infrastructure.  One can argue forever -- as we have :-) --
whether these features are worthwhile, but they are clearly "more stuff"
than the Web itself offers, no? Thus, "HTTP services" are more basic than
"Web services".

Received on Monday, 9 June 2003 00:17:08 UTC