RE: SOAP and the Web architecture

# What do you mean by "support" and "requires something"?  If SOAP requires
# that some, maybe even all software, change 1 parameter, does that count as
# "not supported"?

Yes. Otherwise it would be trivial to change SOAP to use another
port (or, for that matter, another protocol). Almost all firewall
software can easily be configured to change the 1 parameter to
"allow outbound TCP connections on port 5049".

And then there would be no reason to use HTTP because it
"goes through firewalls". However, it's frequently been asserted
that the main reason for SOAP to continue to use port 80 is because
of the impossibility of getting system administrators to change
this one parameter which is clearly within their control to support.

If the plan is to work with existing deployed HTTP proxy infrastructure
to ease the SOAP deployment scenario, then it isn't possible to
wish away the negative interactions with the actual characterstics
of that infrastructure (such as limits on the length of URLs).

If this isn't the plan, then the justification for using HTTP at
all has been weakened significantly.

You can't have it both ways.

Larry

Received on Wednesday, 29 August 2001 01:53:29 UTC