RE: !-Re: ebXML Abandons SOAP

Andrew,

Sorry for the looong delayed response, I've been traveling most of the week.
I don't want your very important question to go unanswered, so here goes.

James Snell pointed out some of the reasons why SOAP version 1.1 fails to
provide a complete infrastructure for ebXML, here are some additional
reasons:

- no support for "popular" encryption and  digital signature technologies
(e.g. PGP and S/MIME)
- no direct handling of binary objects (without encoding)
- no direct support for nesting multiple XML documents in a payload (without
manipulation of the documents)
- no support for reliable messaging semantics
- no packaging semantics for multimedia types
- no defined approach for access control/authentication
- SOAP is not a standard (ebXML required the use of industry standards
whenever possible)

I suppose it would be possible to graft all the functionality needed by
ebXML onto SOAP 1.1, however ebXML was already far down the road in
developing a MIME based solution when SOAP 1.1 was published. Abandoning
ebXML's MIME based solution for SOAP 1.1, combined with all the work needed
to "fill the gaps", would have introduced significant risk into an already
tight delivery schedule.



Dick Brooks (ebXML liaison to W3C XP)
Group 8760
110 12th Street North
Birmingham, AL 35203
dick@8760.com
205-250-8053
Fax: 205-250-8057
http://www.8760.com/

InsideAgent - Empowering e-commerce solutions

> -----Original Message-----
> From: xml-dist-app-request@w3.org [mailto:xml-dist-app-request@w3.org]On
> Behalf Of Andrew Layman
> Sent: Monday, October 09, 2000 1:44 PM
> To: xml-dist-app@w3.org
> Subject: RE: !-Re: ebXML Abandons SOAP
>
>
> Thank you for your clarifying explanation.  During the intervening year
> since ebXML began to investigate candidate technologies there have been
> several important changes that ebXML might want to consider.  In
> particular,
> the SOAP specification that is used by most implementors is not the 0.9
> version that ebXML looked at but the 1.1 version submitted to the
> W3C on May
> 8, 2000 and available at http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/.
>
> This, not the 0.9 version, is the one submitted to the W3C by Ariba, Inc.,
> Commerce One, Inc., Compaq Computer Corporation, DevelopMentor, Inc.,
> Hewlett Packard Company, International Business Machines Corporation, IONA
> Technologies, Lotus Development Corporation, Microsoft Corporation
> SAP AG, and UserLand Software Inc.
>
> This 1.1 specification is not a large technical change from 0.9
> or 1.0, but
> does substantially improve the clarity of the explanations in the
> document.
> In particular, it makes it clear that the SOAP specification addresses not
> just RMC but also general business document exchange.
>

Received on Sunday, 15 October 2000 19:49:51 UTC