Re: SOAP XMPP Binding

Peter,

Hey, this is cool!  Thank you for sending this along.  I am not in a 
position at this point to speak formally for the XML Protocols workgroup. 
Indeed the workgroup is meeting more rarely (I.e. trying to declare 
success) and is focussing primarily on bug fixes and maintenance in the 
short- to medium-term, so I don't know what the likelihood is of your 
getting any sort of formal review.

FWIW, here are some comments that occurred to me personally.   Keep in 
mind that I know about Jabber primarily by reputation (all good!) plus 
what I could infer from the examples in your SOAP document.

* Overall, this looks good, and I'm delighted to see these sorts of 
bindings being created.   We worked hard to layer the SOAP Recommendation 
so that this would be possible, and I'm glad that's proving useful to the 
Jabber community.  Indeed, it would be interesting to hear any comments on 
whether the binding framework, abstractions for MEP's etc. met your needs.

* I don't know the Jabber protocol in detail, but you mention store and 
forward.  It might be worth saying something about how this relates to the 
notion of SOAP intermediaries.  In particular if Jabber is "storing and 
forwarding", you might want to indicate whether and how storage points can 
be addressed as intermediaries, and thus whether or not SOAP processing 
can be done at such waystations.

* I would strongly urge you to consider the emerging MTOM/XOP 
specifications as the basis for your "attachment" work going forward.  I 
think the writing is on the wall that these will be the preferred means of 
doing attachments in SOAP.  I'd expect them to go to full W3C 
Recommendation status real soon now.  In the meantime, the Proposed 
Recommendation versions are at:

    http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/PR-xop10-20041116/
    http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/PR-soap12-mtom-20041116/
    http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/PR-soap12-rep-20041116/

Note that the 3rd of these gives a means not just of carrying binary, but 
of asserting that it is a cached representation of the Web resource at 
some particular URL.  XOP/MTOM map down to multipart/mime as you suggest 
for Jabber, but with a reasonably clean and well-layered processing model 
(in my opinion.)

* You probably need to say something about XML 1.0 vs XML 1.1.  For the 
moment, SOAP is XML 1.0 only (primarily because we have a normative schema 
and there is no way to write a normative schema for an XML 1.1 document 
just yet.)  Not sure where Jabber (or the rest of the industry for that 
matter) is headed on XML 1.1, but it might be worth a sentence or two to 
tell your story, whatever it is.  Specifically, if you allow <?xml 
version="1.1"?> on a Jabber message, then you might have to explicitly say 
that the constructs within the <soap:envelope> subtree must result in an 
Infoset that could have been represented in an XML 1.0 document.  No new 
characters in element names, etc.

* It would be interesting to consider the pros and cons of supporting the 
SOAP WebMethod feature.  With that, you could have a standard means of 
doing a Jabber request to "Get" a representation of a resource in the form 
of an application/soap+xml envelope.  Not sure if that's the sort of thing 
one commonly does with Jabber.   I'm also not sure whether this is a good 
idea or not.  One advantage of this approach is that it points a way to 
gatewaying into HTTP gets.   Then again, I should admit that industry 
support for WebMethod=GET seems to be all too spotty at the moment, even 
for HTTP. 

I'm not a WSDL expert, so I haven't reviewed those sections in detail. 
Similarly, there are others in the XMLP WG who know the HTTP binding state 
machine better than I do.  Your equivalent looks close enough to fool me, 
but that doesn't mean much.  Hope this is helpful, and thanks for sending 
it along!

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
--------------------------------------








Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter@jabber.org>
Sent by: xml-dist-app-request@w3.org
01/11/2005 12:04 PM

 
        To:     xml-dist-app@w3.org
        cc:     www-ws-cq@w3.org, (bcc: Noah Mendelsohn/Cambridge/IBM)
        Subject:        SOAP XMPP Binding



Hugo Haas recommended that I communicate with the XML Protocol Working
Group (cc'ing the W3C Web Services Coordination Group) regarding a
binding of SOAP to XMPP (see RFC 3920) that has been defined by the 
Jabber Software Foundation (JSF). The SOAP XMPP Binding is specified in
JEP-0072 within the JSF's JEP series:

http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0072.html

At this time, we would very much appreciate it if an appropriate expert
from the W3C could provide an informal review of this specification
(much as we did last year regarding a spec for sending XHTML over XMPP).
Once we complete this informal review and make appropriate adjustments 
to the specification, the Jabber Council will decide whether to advance
the spec to a status of Draft within the JSF's standards process. At a
later stage in the life of this spec (before it advances to a status of
Final), it would be appropriate to complete a more formal review, but at
this time we are seeking an informal review only.

Please let me know if you need further information from me.

Thanks,

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
Jabber Software Foundation
http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.php

Received on Monday, 17 January 2005 05:54:33 UTC