RE: REST, uniformity and semantics

The following text by Noah Mendelsohn (extracted from
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003May/0062.html)
seems highly relevant to the "REST, uniformity and semantics"
thread. Note in particular the final sentence. (The point would be
even stronger, IMHO, if it explicitly mentioned the issue of "safe SOAP"
over non-HTTP bindings....)

> <suggested>
> 6 Ongoing work on GET in Web Services
>
> Since the first publication of this finding, W3C's XML Protocol Working
> Group has enhanced SOAP Version 1.2 to support use of GET for safe
> operations (cf. section 6.4 of [SOAPADJUNCTS].)  Specific conventions 
> are
> also now suggested for use of GET in conjunction with SOAP Remote
> Procedure Calls (cf. section 4.1.2 of [SOAPADJUNCTS].)  The SOAP HTTP
> binding (cf. section 7 of [SOAPADJUNCTS]) has been modified 
> accordingly,
> and thus supports appropriate use of GET and POST in for both 
> RPC-oriented
> and non-RPC SOAP message exchanges.  Indeed, non-normative conventions 
> are
> suggested which allow traditional Web servers (I.e. those not 
> specifically
> enabled for SOAP support) to interoperate with SOAP clients using GET 
> and
> resource representations in media type application/soap+xml (cf. 
> section
> 7.1.3 of [SOAPADJUNCTS]).
>
> Section 3 of WSDL 1.2 Bindings [WSDL] provides a binding to HTTP GET,
> which makes it possible to respect the principle of using GET for safe
> operations. However, to represent safety in a more straightforward 
> manner,
> it should be a property of operations themselves, not just a feature of
> bindings.
> </suggested>
>

Received on Friday, 16 May 2003 12:59:25 UTC