Re: Proposed issue; Visibility of Web services

On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 12:28:46PM -0400, Christopher B Ferris wrote:
> I guess I just don't know what you think a "generic" intermediary is then. 
> Give me an example
> of a generic HTTP intermediary that does not have a specific role(s) like 
> caching.  If my cache example
> is not generic, I don't know what is. You seemed to have simply ignored 
> that aspect of
> my previous message. Was my example not "generic" by your standards?

No, at least not for the purposes of doing the apples-to-apples
visibility comparison.  I was trying to emphasize that HTTP defines
many application layer features, while SOAP does not.  That may seem
obvious and non-important, because SOAP may have lots in the future, but
that's really the point; it doesn't have them now, so a SOAP
intermediary developed with no knowledge of them has no visibility into
a transaction that uses them (outside of knowing that it doesn't know
what they mean, ala mustUnderstand).

Mike has said that SOAP firewalls will be going to market soon.  What
SOAP applications will they understand?  Will those firewalls be
upgraded for every new extension that comes along?  Because that's the
only way will they have similar visibility into SOAP transactions that
HTTP intermediaries developed today will have into HTTP transactions
executed 10 years from now.

BTW, I would *really* appreciate a response to this;

> > A SOAP+E intermediary would have *excellent* visibility into an
> > interaction between a client and server using those extensions, right?.
> > For example, if it had hardcoded-in knowledge of WS-Transaction, then it
> > could sit between a client and server coordinating a transaction, and
> > be able to follow along quite well; far better than it could if
> > something other than a transaction was being coordinated.  Agreed?
> > 
> > So can you see my point?  HTTP is at the same layer as WS-Transaction;
> > both are application layer coordination languages.

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 Thursday, 29 May 2003 14:49:04 UTC