Issue 32: SOAP 1.1 support

BEA Systems has considerable reservations about any decision to not support
SOAP 1.1 in WSDL 2.0. While we understand much of the motivation - that SOAP
1.1 is a W3C Note only and the desire to simplify WSDL 2.0 scope - we
believe that this could harm the adoption of WSDL 2.0 and even SOAP 1.2.

We believe that companies will be deploying both SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2
solutions. Unfortunately, WSDL 1.1 does not have an elegent mechanism for
description SOAP 1.2. We have already heard customer pushback on SOAP 1.2
because of this deficit. That implies that WSDL 2.0 is the solution for
those wanting to describe SOAP 1.2 deployment. But it is unlikely that
customers, and all their business partners that they communicate using SOAP
1.1 will all upgrade to SOAP 1.2 and WSDL 2.0 at the same time. This means
they will be deploying SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2, and described by WSDL 1.1 and
WSDL 2.0 respectively.

We believe that requiring both WSDL 1.1 and WSDL 2.0 to co-exist in customer
and their partner sites will prove too high a barrier for many customers to
adopt WSDL 2.0. We also believe that even if someone supports WSDL 2.0 and
SOAP 1.2 their business partners will still continue to use SOAP 1.1 as the
transition to SOAP 1.2 will take time.  We are also seeing that
specifications are being published that have explicit support for SOAP 1.1
and SOAP 1.2. further evidence of a mixture of deployment in the industry.
Therefore it is important that it be possible to describe SOAP 1.1
communications in WSDL 2.0 so that a WSDL 2.0 compliant system can continue
to interact with existing partners.

We ask the group to consider resolving Issue 32 in favour of SOAP 1.1
support.

Cheers,
Dave

Received on Tuesday, 20 January 2004 19:19:45 UTC