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RE: What does SOAP really add?

• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>,"Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@m...>
• Subject: RE: What does SOAP really add?
• From: "Don Box" <dbox@m...>
• Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 22:45:30 -0700
• Cc: <xml-dev@l...>
• Thread-index: AcHpcOWylBWCBvvzTjazM9ejKugp3wBF50TQ
• Thread-topic: What does SOAP really add?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@s...]
> Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2002 1:19 PM
> To: Joshua Allen
> Cc: xml-dev@l...
> Subject: RE:  What does SOAP really add?
> 
> On Sun, 2002-04-21 at 15:06, Joshua Allen wrote:
> > Are you asking what benefit SOAP brings vs. everyone just rolling
their
> > own XML serialization/envelope formats?
> 
> Yes.

At this point in time, the primary benefit of SOAP is a common framing
format (e.g., Envelope/Header/Body) with a well-understood extensibility
model. Not rocket science, but pretty widely accepted as the way web
services will work.

The serialization aspects of SOAP became less important as XML Schema
solidified (remember that when we started in 1998, there wasn't even a
schema WG in the W3C). 

At this point, I believe most SOAP plumbers have conceded that XML
Schema will be the dominant type system and metadata format for interop.
How one converts from their local type system to the world of XML Schema
is a local problem that is (and should be) outside the scope of SOAP. 

In MSFT-land, we do the conversion by importing XML Schema into our
runtime and making the "foreign" types look local. That technology is
broadly useful outside the scope of SOAP and/or web services, so we make
it accessible everywhere, although I'm sure there are lots of customers
who have no idea this is even in the platform.

DB

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