Representations and messages (was Re: What is a SOAP Message

On Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 10:11:18AM -0800, David Orchard wrote:
> I believe that your counter example is still a representation.  It's simply
> a representation of a request.

Sort of, but not really. 8-)

It's true that if you assigned URIs to messages, and then invoked GET
on one, that you may see something bit-wise identical to a real message.
But it would be a representation, not a message, because it's returned
over GET, and GET returns representations; there's no room to process it
like a message.  What I mean by that last part is that if I received the
following representation;

  PUT http://www.whitehouse.gov HTTP/1.0
  Content-Type: text/plain
  [blank line]
  The President is a weenie

Then I wouldn't be obligated to process it as an HTTP PUT request, nor
would the agent that sent it expect that I would.  That's the differene
between a message and a representation.

Hopefully you can see the security implications of treating
representations as messages. 8-)

> The point being, the SOAP architecture fits very well into the web
> architecture, once one clearly defines the relationship between these terms.

I think SOAP can fit very well into Web architecture, but only by
encapsulating representations within the envelope rather than messages.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis

Received on Monday, 10 February 2003 21:05:00 UTC