Re: Issue: should WSDL be able to describe an operation with *anything* in the message?

Arthur, whether or not a piece of plumbing is a web service (and vice
versa), that's a different hairy discussion. Let's assume a
content-based router is, in fact, viewed as a service.

What's useful about a service description with a single operation that
accepts anything (and if it has a product, it can be anything again)?
One probably won't necessarily compile this into a proxy class because
that is easily superseded by dynamic invocation libraries.

But when invoking such a service (sending it a message), one wants to
get the actual address and binding information from somewhere, and WSDL
is traditionally used for this task. In fact, the tooling should be able
to handle operations with anything at all in the body quite nicely,
especially if we accept the likes of Umit's proposal on carrying
operation identification with messages.

What do you think?

                   Jacek Kopecky

                   Systinet Corporation
                   http://www.systinet.com/




On Wed, 2004-02-18 at 16:43, Arthur Ryman wrote:
> Jacek,
> 
> I don't think this is a valid use case for WSDL since you are not
> really describing a service but rather a piece of the plumbing (a SOAP
> intermediaryperhaps). WSDL should be used to describe services and
> provide information that is usefulo to application developers.
> 
> Arthur Ryman,
> Rational Desktop Tools Development
> 
> phone: 905-413-3077, TL 969-3077
> assistant: 905-413-2411, TL 969-2411
> fax: 905-413-4920, TL 969-4920
> intranet: http://w3.torolab.ibm.com/DEAB/
> 
> www-ws-desc-request@w3.org wrote on 02/18/2004 09:51:24 AM:
> 
> > 
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I stumbled upon a scenario the other day where I'd like to be able
> to
> > describe an endpoint with a single logical operation ("accept" or
> > "notify" or something) that can accept any SOAP message. Somebody
> wanted
> > a WSDL for this endpoint and I found out that WSDL 1.1 with a single
> > message part of the type xs:anyType is not supported in doc/lit, and
> in
> > fact in 
> > WSDL 2 such a thing cannot be accomplished at all because every
> message
> > has exactly one XML element and the SOAP binding puts precisely that
> > element as a child of soap:Body.
> > 
> > Should WSDL be able to describe such an endpoint? I think so because
> it
> > is common in various message sink situations - a router, a topic,
> > generic notification sink etc.
> > 
> > I can see a simple solution that would state that if a GED is not
> > specified for a message, it can be everything. There are other
> > alternative solutions, but this seems the simplest and least bad.
> > 
> > Sorry about bringing this up so late,
> > 
> >                    Jacek Kopecky
> > 
> >                    Systinet Corporation
> >                    http://www.systinet.com/
> > 
> > 
> > 
> >

Received on Wednesday, 18 February 2004 11:06:41 UTC