RE: On WSDL "operation"

Mark:

> I think I understand what you're asking for, but it's something very
> different than what WSDL currently is and does.  With your proposal,
> what WSDL is currently used for would require using a technology such
> as IDL.

I believe that WSDL has been abused as an object IDL, and I have abused it
in this way myself, and toolkit vendors help propagate that view. However,
objects and Web Services are chalk and cheese, and WSDL should evolve to
take into account the fact that we as a community are discovering how to
properly use Web Services (i.e. that the semantics are simply that they
exchange messages and do not share type information).

If I have (inadvertently) tabled a proposal, that it is that we should
simplify the basic view of Web Services to be just entities exchanging
messages (which is WSA, no?), and that WSDL should support that and provide
extensibility mechanisms for all the other stuff. Other higher-level Web
Services protocols can be layered on top of this simple underlay.

So in short:

1. Web Services exchange messages.
2. WSDL describes those messages (and perhaps how they might be exchanged).
This includes both abstract and concrete forms of those messages.
3. All the other stuff is out of scope (and indeed only makes sense when
there is an application to resolve what it means).

I believe WSDL can do this, it's just that with nouns like "operation" we
implicitly suggest to developers that WSDL is an IDL, when it isn't, it's a
CDL.

Jim

PS - Does this mean we agree? :-)

Received on Monday, 29 September 2003 09:30:31 UTC