Re: Two uses of SOAP

The disadvantages? Oh, I can think of a few on that one:

1) Because it is essentially a large clear-text message, it requires
encryption of the message for anything involving secure information; for a
p2p chat system the overhead that this imposes is fairly minimal, for a
large-scale e-commerce envelope used in RPCs the construction of the
message, the encryption, the increased size for often relatively small
amounts of data moving either way and the parseing of XML structures on both
ends brings a significant cost to the total transaction.

2) I worry about putting an RPC mechanism into the hands of VB scripters and
HTML coders who have absolutely no clue about handling distributed
asynchronous messages, or worse, that do but have malicious intent. I worry
that there is no checksum or integrity checking.

3) MustUnderstand could prove to be a significant hurdle across multiple
peers.

4) I worry about the plethora of namespaces that we're introducing. While it
may make sense to separate functionality into distinct messages, I can't
help but think about the problems attendant when Netscape moved their RSS
spec around -- we may be introducing dependencies here that are neither
necessary nor intended.

Just a few of my thoughts. I'm definitely still something of a newbie when
it comes to SOAP, so some or perhaps all of these issues may already be
resolved, but I think it might be worth asking this question of other people
who aren't so close to the issue or the specification.

-- Kurt Cagle
-- Co-author, XML Schema, Wrox Press

----- Original Message -----
From: "Frank D. Greco" <fgreco@crossroadstech.com>
To: <xml-dist-app@w3.org>
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2001 6:45 AM
Subject: Re: Two uses of SOAP


> At 09:49 PM 7/27/2001 -0400, Mark Baker wrote:
>  >Just thought I'd write down more about the two uses of SOAP that
>  >I'm familiar with.
>
> Actually, anyone have any thoughts (or URL's) of the
> disadvantages of SOAP?  Something just doesn't feel right
> about it.
>
> Frank G.
> +======================================================================+
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> |    Mobile Java Application Engineering                               |
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Received on Monday, 30 July 2001 10:33:15 UTC