Re: SOAP and Cacheability

On Tue, 19 Apr 2011, Dan Brickley wrote:

> On 19 April 2011 16:56, Noah Mendelsohn <nrm@arcanedomain.com> wrote:
>> My impression is that the major vendors aren't doing a whole lot to enhance
>> their SOAP stacks at this point, but I could be wrong about that. More to
>> the point, they seem not to have been convinced that the RESTful variant was
>> worth the trouble then, and since then there's been a lot of deployment that
>> just uses POST.
>>
>> Frankly, I think a lot of the use cases where one might have considered use
>> of RESTful SOAP are now JSON, and I'd be disinclined to fight that trend.
>> The pros and cons are ultimately somewhat subtle in principle (e.g.
>> documents vs. just data), but in practice this is where everyone is going,
>> and mostly works, and for the data-only cases it's convenient. So, I'm
>> doubtful much is going to happen on the SOAP side.
>
> Thanks, that lines up with my impression too, but I don't follow SOAP
> so closely. A lot of the noise and excitement has moved on elsewhere,
> but there must still be a lot of SOAP around... ...not to mentions
> lessons to be learned.

We tried to provide real endpoints serving SOAP/1.2 using GET, namely 
validators, see [1],[2], along with WSDL2 definitions. I know that it has 
been used by third party tools, like browser extensions, but I would bet 
that those are not using WS toolkits and are using the SOAP output as 
plain XML. It amounts to roughly 70khits/day for the CSS validator.

[1] http://validator.w3.org/docs/api.html
[2] http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/api.html

> One reason to ask is that in the new RDF WG we have a chartered
> deliverable around JSON (http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/wiki/TF-JSON)
> and it's reminding me of the discussions from a while back around SOAP
> Encoding, since both that and JSON provide a kind of quick and
> convenient way of dumping and restoring programmatic objects without a
> formal schema. Some of the same issues crop up: if Web services are
> using JSON (or SOAP encoding) to talk to each other, how are those
> structures best defined and documented?

Most toolkits are generating stubs from the XML schema type definition, 
more than validating input in messages, and it led to discrepancy between 
implementations and language used (see http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-patterns/ )
There will be corner cases as well in the JSON world, even if it is 
schema-less, but it might be easier to identify and fix discrepancies than 
if there are toolkits involved.

> But I'm offtopic from the original query. Nice to see some traffic on
> xml-dist-app though, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/
> plots the rise and fall of discussions -- things were last in double
> figures monthly in July 2007...
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>

-- 
Baroula que barouleras, au tiéu toujou t'entourneras.

         ~~Yves

Received on Thursday, 16 June 2011 13:10:17 UTC