Re: updated proposal on issue #144 - array metadata in SOAP Encod ing

> How can sparseness be communicated?

In my soap library (ZSI; http://www.zolera.com/resources/opensrc/zsi),
it's meta-data the application feeds to the serializer.

As Jacek said, it's an *application* thing, not a SOAP thing.  SOAP just
knows that there is data that has a "position" attribute.

> Why say 'types are good' and then say 'indicating sparseness is not
> necessary'?

I don't hold that position.  It is only because of the fragility of
current implementations, I believe, that typing is dominant.  Once we
get dedicated clients talking to dedicated servers then typing should
melt away.  It's only because right now we're generally doing things
with all-purposes clients and servers, and we want to debug our
implementations, that typing is included.  Sparseness isn't a type, it's
an attribute of data that an application CAN feed to its SOAP library so
that a data-transfer optimization *that the application on the other
side is expecting* can be performed.
	/r$

-- 
Zolera Systems, Securing web services (XML, SOAP, Signatures,
Encryption)
http://www.zolera.com

Received on Tuesday, 13 November 2001 07:22:23 UTC