RE: [SOAP] soap question

> I, and many people I have talked to, would like the scenario of sending
> "objects" as part of or related to an XP message.  If that then means that
> the XP specification then has to do some work to define the
> relationships -
> addressing, encoding, by-value/by-reference - as a framework for object
> passing, so beit.  Nobody ever said our job was to do trivial things.  We
> could have just changed the SOAP namespace values to w3.org/* and changed
> the namespace identifiers from soapenv to xpenv.

Hi David,
What you are talking about here is serialization of objects in a form that
is
valid for XP, i.e. as XML or perhaps as a binary attachment. How we can
do that without defining or referencing an object model is strange territory
to me. Maybe you want to define object references to pass around - how
are you going to identify the object? How do you discover the reference
and what goes in there?

> My guess is that standardized sending objects with XP is the
> single biggest
> requirement that people would like on top of SOAP.  Probably why
> it was (one
> of?) the first Note related to SOAP submitted to the W3C.

Hmm. I can't say that this has been obvious from the f2f interactions that
I've been through.

> I don't agree that we have to define an object model for XP.  We
> can safely
> leave the objects opaque.  We would have to define a mechanism for
> referencing and/or containing an object model. There is a Note before the
> W3C on exactly how to do this, sans object model.  Therefore it is proven
> that passing opaque objects can be defined without a defined
> object model.

You don't need an object model when you have 'opaque objects' because
'opaque objects' are just data blobs. An extension mechanism such
as SOAP headers will allow you to pass blobs. This is fine, just don't
call them 'objects' because that is a more semantically rich term!

 --oh

Received on Thursday, 1 February 2001 03:18:52 UTC