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Mike Champion wrote, > I guess my question is, "If HTTP is so general, why are vendors such > as BEA, Tibco, Progress, etc. moving to other protocols to "ensure > delivery of XML documents" via web services? It's easy to agree > with Mark Baker (especially after browsing the REST Wiki) that in > principle HTTP is a 99/1 solution for internet communications, so > why is the world backing away from this in practice? Because HTTP isn't any such thing. HTTP is a synchronous, point to point, almost realtime, online protocol. That's inappropriate for huge classes of real world transactions. As an simple example, take any business transaction more long-winded than typing in credit card number, hitting a submit button and getting a near instant response. Perhaps the transaction has to be approved by a person, so processing takes a couple of hours (maybe much longer if it arrives late on a Friday evening). What might the requestor want to do in the interim? Disconnect from the network? Move to a different endpoint? Or perhaps there's a network partition during the transaction, or an unfriendly intermediary decides to time out an apparently idle connection. HTTP just wasn't designed for that kind of communication model. Cheers, Miles -- Miles Sabin InterX Internet Systems Architect 27 Great West Road +44 (0)20 8817 4030 Middx, TW8 9AS, UK msabin@i... http://www.interx.com/
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