Re: Announce: A brief history of SOAP

Larry,

I respectfully disagree. Requiring that metadata is in a standard format
(like WSDL) raises the bar too high. I can do a hell of a lot with only the
simple knowledge of what method to call at what endpoint, and with what
parameter types (and names).

I don't need WSDL (or any SDL) for that. Human-readable docs are more than
enough.

If you can parse a standard service description, and if that helps you, then
more power to you, but requiring that I do the same isn't fair.

-Jake

ps. (I'd replied to this message yesterday, but accidentally only sent the
reply directly to Larry, instead of to the list -- my apologies.)

on 4/3/01 3:58 PM, Larry Cable at larry.cable@sfbay.sun.com wrote:

> Andrew Layman wrote:
> 
>> If I send you a message such as
>> 
>> <Translate>
>> <gamma>123.45</gamma>
>> <epsilon>.67</epsilon>
>> <pi>3.14159</pi>
>> </Translate>
>> 
>> then you presumably either have somehow got some idea what this message
>> means and what its structure is etc., or you don't and cannot process it
>> (except as generic XML).  However you got the knowledge, that was the
>> metadata.
>> 
>> In the case of the messages sent to the "SOAP Validator" at UserLand's
>> site, the documentation describing the messages is the metadata.
>> 
>> I don't think you can do much without some metadata.  The only issue is
>> the form that the metadata takes, largely whether it is in a standard
>> form or not.
> 
> I concur, furthermore I would reinforce your assertion that a std mechanism
> for describing such meta-data
> is a "requirement" in order to enable both static and dynamic service
> discovery and subsequent conversations.
> 
> Rgds
> 
> - Larry Cable.
> 
>> 
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Dave Winer [mailto:dave@userland.com]
>> Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2001 3:31 PM
>> To: xml-dist-app@w3.org
>> Subject: Re: Announce: A brief history of SOAP
>> 
>> Andrew I don't know enough about the kinds of environments you use, but
>> I'm
>> with Fredrik on this. We do just fine without any meta data. No
>> "requires"
>> here. Dave
>> 
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Andrew Layman" <andrewl@microsoft.com>
>> To: <xml-dist-app@w3.org>
>> Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2001 12:07 PM
>> Subject: RE: Announce: A brief history of SOAP
>> 
>>> I think that the point is that any exchange of messages via SOAP (or
>>> otherwise) requires that the parties have mutual access to some sort
>> of
>>> metadata describing the types of the data being exchanged.  WSDL
>>> provides such metadata in an implementation-neutral way that supports
>>> and leverages the W3C specifications such as Schema.
>>> 
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Fredrik Lundh [mailto:fredrik@pythonware.com]
>>> Sent: Saturday, March 31, 2001 2:35 AM
>>> To: Box, Don
>>> Cc: xml-dist-app@w3.org
>>> Subject: Re: Announce: A brief history of SOAP
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> You can read it at http://www.develop.com/dbox/postsoap.html
>>> 
>>> "Does SOAP/XML Messaging make sense without something like
>>> WSDL? No way"
>>> 
>>> huh?  I've got lots of users for my python soap implementation,
>>> and now you're saying that what they do doesn't make sense?
>>> 
>>> what have we missed?
>>> 
>>> Cheers /F
>>> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 4 April 2001 06:39:07 UTC