Re: The role of transfer protocols

On Mon, 9 Jan 2006, Mark Baker wrote:

> In your initial WSRX/MEP post to which I responded, you were making an
> incorrect assumption about the relationship between SOAP and HTTP.  In
> particular, you were assuming a layered relationship (i.e. the same as
> the relationship between, say, HTTP and TCP, or TCP/IP and Ethernet).
> But as I've pointed out, the SOAP 1.2 HTTP binding is a *transfer*
> binding, with SOAP playing the role of an HTTP *extension*.  This
> means that a message produced by this binding has application
> semantics that are a function of information in *both* the HTTP and
> SOAP envelopes.

The SOAP 1.1 binding to HTTP was targeting the use of HTTP as a tunnel, 
the use of 200 and 500 was consistent with this.
In SOAP 1.2, the integration with HTTP is tighter, and the fact that more 
HTTP return codes, as well as verbs are used is an indication of that, 
it's no longer layered on top of HTTP but integrated to it. However the 
image showing the relationship between the different "layers" defined in 
the abstract model [1] may be read as... a layering between SOAP's HTTP 
binding and HTTP.

It is important to keep the current integration of the HTTP binding as is, 
ie: that we don't mix tunnelling with HTTP codes not meant for that.

(so, +1 to Mark's comment)

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-xmlp-am-20030220/Figure5-1.png


-- 
Yves Lafon - W3C
"Baroula que barouleras, au tiéu toujou t'entourneras."

Received on Monday, 9 January 2006 14:28:54 UTC