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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Francis McCabe [mailto:fgm@fla.fujitsu.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2003 12:13 PM
> To: Christopher B Ferris
> Cc: 'www-ws-arch@w3.org'
> Subject: Re: Counting noses on "is SOAP and/or WSDL intrinsic 
> to the def
> inition of Web service"
> 

> I believe that we have a choice here: we can attempt to bless the 
> current chaos, or we can give our professional opinion as to what is 
> really needed. I personally favor attempting the latter (since we are 
> SUPPOSED to be the people who know).

Yup.  I've come around to that position over the last year.  Or more
precisely, SOAP and WSDL have evolved to snatch the low-hanging fruit from
the RESTifarians' trees ;-) so there is no longer the stark choice between
"bless existing practice" with HTTP and XML  and "insist on SOAP and WSDL at
the core of the WSA."   

> 
> Having said all that, there is the great American tradition of 
> grandfathering existing practice. I have no objection to that; but, I 
> repeat, I believe that we do our audience no favors if we 
> fail to grasp  the larger mandate.

I could live with the proposed message: "There are all sorts of ways of
doing web services if you don't need [all the stuff in our Requirements
document that you don't get out of the box with SOAP and WSDL], and you have
our blessing to call them "basic Web services" or whatever. But if you *do*
need secure, reliable, protocol-agnostic, transactional, correlated,
choreographed, managed, etc. Web services, our advice is to build on the
foundations of SOAP and WSDL, because the alternative is chaos.   

That's a bit stronger than my personal opinion  -- I'm fascinated by
alternatives such as XML spaces and pipelines for SOA implementations, but I
can also live with the scenario where these are outside the WSA.   On the
other hand, I don't know offhand why a WSA-compliant choreography language
couldn't / shouldn't describe these kinds of asynchronous interactions, so
it may not be an issue.  I certainly don't want to bend over backward to
allow such things to be blessed by WSA if that makes the wording so
ambiguous that it allows more or less anything to be WSA-compliant.

Received on Tuesday, 10 June 2003 12:40:27 UTC