RE: REST, uniformity and semantics

FWIW:  note that I touched only the first paragraph.  The WSDL paragraph 
was lifted unedited from Ian's draft, and was included only for 
completeness.  When you refer to the last sentence, I'm not sure whether 
you're referring to the 1st Para (which I editied) or the 2nd (didn't). 

If you're talking about the interop of SOAP clients w/traditional web 
servers then yes, I think this is very important, if non-normative 
(because we can't control the alrey deployed servers).  Indeed, it would 
be quite reasonable for a combined SOAP client/browser to do content 
negotiation requesting application/soap+xml or text/html for a stock 
quote, and making the best of whatever came back.  If SOAP, then it is 
definitely processable with the SOAP processing model (e.g. you could 
check a signature in a header to make sure the quote was intact.)

Thanks.

------------------------------------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn                              Voice: 1-617-693-4036
IBM Corporation                                Fax: 1-617-693-8676
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
------------------------------------------------------------------







Geoff Arnold <Geoff.Arnold@Sun.COM>
05/16/2003 12:57 PM

 
        To:     www-ws-arch@w3.org
        cc:     noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com
        Subject:        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 13:13:22 UTC