Re: Proposed issue; Visibility of Web services

(CCing Noah again)

On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 11:51:47AM -0400, Champion, Mike wrote:
> Hmm, maybe I see: the moons of Jupiter are "visible" in that you can see
> them with a telescope, but they are not visible to unaided human eyesight.
> Therefore they are less visible than is Jupiter.  But imagine trying to
> explain this to an intelligent hawk (assuming that hawks' vision is sharp
> enough to resolve the moons of Jupiter) -- the hawk would be mystified that
> you are trying to treat a quantitative limitation of human vision as a
> qualitative property :-) 

Very colorful analogy, but I don't think it represents the point I'm
trying to make.

> HTTP verbs are visible only because there is a class of intermediaries that
> understands HTTP syntax and semaantics; standardized SOAP headers will be
> visible to a new generation of SOAP intermediaries that understand the SOAP
> envelope schema and and processing model and either know natively or can be
> configured to work with the semantics of specific header standards (e.g.
> something like WS-Security).

No, it's mostly the shared understanding of methods which improves
visibility dramatically, not the headers.

In a recent thread here, I believe it was agreed that a SOAP
intermediary hardcoded to have specific knowledge of a given WSDL file,
had better visibility into the interactions between clients and servers
using that same WSDL file, than did a generic SOAP intermediary, or a
SOAP intermediary hardcoded to some other WSDL file.  That's exactly the
kind of increase in visibility that using an application protocol
provides.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis
  Actively seeking contract work or employment

Received on Monday, 26 May 2003 14:06:21 UTC