Re: Issue 192; HTTP binding looks ok

Hi Jacek,

>  Mark,
>  I think the current text may be interpreted as the message being
> authoritative, the binding mandating use of 4xx and 5xx for SOAP
> Faults and the transition table expecting the two sources of
> "faultness" of the message to be in accord.

Hmm, that's not my interpretation.  In the transition table we see that
the HTTP status line (e.g. "HTTP/1.1 200 Ok") contains the information
with which state transitions are determined, independant of the body.

For example, it says that if you're in the Waiting state, and you see a
response status line saying "HTTP/1.1 200 Ok", then you change state at
that point (to "Receiving"), whether or not a SOAP fault follows in the
body.  This is goodness from a REST POV, but also from a performance
POV; no party has to wait for the body to arrive and be parsed before
it can take action on a state change, which means lower latency for
the entire chain.

>  I think that if we decide that ultimately the message is the
> authoritative source here, we'll just have to add a text saying 
> that if there is a discord (fault message on 2xx, non-fault on 
> 4xx, 5xx) it's the same kind of error like receiving an 
> incomplete envelope - transport error.
>  Or if we decide that the faultHint is in fact a faultOverride, 
> we'll have to clarify that.
>  I understand that taking the HTTP status code as the
> authoritative source of this information is very REST but as I
> still favor the tunneling approach and I haven't seen any clear
> indication from the group that our HTTP binding will be REST, we
> probably want to get to a compromise.
>  Using the HTTP error status codes for SOAP faults is not
> completely against the tunneling approach, but making the status
> codes override the message is crossing the line, at least for me.
>  Maybe the group should decide which approach to take in our
> binding and accept it fully, or make two HTTP bindings.

I hope it doesn't come to that, but I've raised that possibility
before.  It still surprises me that we've managed to get as far as we
have without the group having concensus about the relationship between
SOAP and the underlying protocols.

>  Best regards,
> 
>                    Jacek Kopecky
> 
>                    Senior Architect, Systinet (formerly Idoox)
>                    http://www.systinet.com/
> 
> P.S: Mark, I really want to talk to you about REST and SOAP, how 
> about at the WS-Arch and WS-Desc f2f? 8-)

I'll be there from Sunday to Wednesday.  I'd be happy to talk with you
about it.  See you there!

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.      mbaker@planetfred.com
http://www.markbaker.ca   http://www.planetfred.com

Received on Monday, 18 March 2002 23:00:01 UTC