RE: SOAP and OO: Dynamic Services

WSDL provides a way to define service types and also to declare service
instances when they have static addresses.  There could be various
protocols invented that dynamically return references to service
instances. These instances could be of types that are statically
declared in a WSDL file, or perhaps described via a dynamically-created
WSDL file. 

A separate issue is whether dynamically-created service instances are
typically a good, scalable programming model.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Peacock [mailto:ben@sheredev.co.uk] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2001 7:28 AM
To: 'xml-dist-app@w3.org'
Subject: SOAP and OO: Dynamic Services


I am struggling with how to apply my understanding of object-oriented
architecture to SOAP. SOAP seems to me a useful widely-supported
alternative to COM and CORBA. Some articles I have read seem to reflect
this, others seem to suggest SOAP utilises a new service-based
architecture, rather than the familiar object-oriented one used by COM
and CORBA. (But if it is service-based, why is it not called SSAP?)

SOAP seems to divide the object world into static objects that have
operations and are referenced as services at URIs, and dynamic objects
that have no operations and are passed by value. (By static I mean
effectively created once and never destroyed, and by dynamic I mean
created and destroyed on demand.) There seems to be no standard way in
SOAP of representing and referring to dynamic objects as services. The
ability to create objects with operations dynamically is a fundamental
aspect of object-oriented architecture.

For example, if I am writing a simple sales service, I might define a
couple of interfaces:

interface PointOfSale {
	Transaction createTransaction();
}

interface Transaction {
	void addItem( Item );
	void purchase( Payment );
}

where Item and Payment are pass-by-value types. PointOfSale is a static
object that is always available and clients are told where to find it:
this is easily represented using SOAP. However the dynamically created
Transaction cannot be represented in a standard way using SOAP. The SOAP
specification intentionally excludes objects-by-reference, I presume due
to maintaining simplicity and not specifying a garbage collection model.
However by specifically excluding them it at least gives them credit as
a concept.

One easy solution is to merge the two interfaces:

interface PointOfSale2 {
	TransactionReference createTransaction();
	void addItem( TransactionReference, Item );
	void purchase( TransactionReference, Payment );
}

But this is very non-object-oriented and thus will not scale and is not
easily extensible.

Some HTTP implementations of SOAP add information to SOAPAction or SOAP
message header defining the object being targeted by a message. However,
these are all completely different and are not compatible with each
other.

Static SOAP objects are referred to by URIs, which seems a reasonable
(and
consistent) solution for dynamic objects. This also means that clients
need not be aware whether an object is static or dynamic, which is
great. So
createTransaction() could return a URI which clients can send messages
to, perhaps http://me.com/Transaction123 or
http://me.com/Transaction?id=123 (it would be helpful to have a
convention for dynamic URIs). Now, a client may want to know exactly
what it has a reference to, which could be an object of any subclass of
Transaction, so the returned URI needs to be dynamically typed (probably
with reference to a WSDL port type), and there is no standard way of
representing this.

I am not sure if SOAP itself should be enhanced with a dynamic object
reference type, because this is against its stated design goals.
However, without any standard way of representing dynamic objects I am
sure that many different ways will (and have already been) invented of
achieving this, none of which will interoperate. Surely it would be
better for W3C to define a SOAP extension for representing dynamic
objects? I would suggest doing this by adopting WSDL as the W3C standard
for describing SOAP services, and enhancing WSDL so that it can be used
to describe both static and dynamic objects by providing a way of
defining dynamic references (URIs) for services.

I cannot find any articles really addressing this issue. Even articles
comparing CORBA and SOAP do not mention that CORBA represents dynamic
objects in standard way and SOAP does not, which seems a fundamental
problem for the CORBA-SOAP bridges that are appearing. So am I missing
something? Are we all meant to move away from object-oriented
architecture (which when properly applied works ten times better than
anything else I have seen), to some new service-based architecture? If
so, what is this new architecture and why is it better?

Does anyone have any insight on this?

Ben

Received on Wednesday, 11 July 2001 14:52:38 UTC