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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Benefits of SOAP? - was Re: Sun's senior IT architect Victoria
 On Feb 14, 2004, at 2:07 PM, Dennis Sosnoski wrote: > > The initial buzz around SOAP was all based on the rpc/encoded use (or > Microsoft's "wrapped" variation) where method calls were > "transparently" exposed as web services. Now that that's effectively > deprecated in WS-I BP 1.0 (for good reason) SOAP currently offers very > little (if any) functionality beyond what can be done using direct XML > interchange over HTTP. > ... It's embarrassing when I teach web services to be able to show so > little benefit from SOAP, given all the attention it's received. > People feel that with so much marketing hype there has to be more > substance than I'm able to demonstrate. > Having spent much of the last two years on the work that led to http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/NOTE-ws-arch-20040211/ and wrestling with this question, I'm very sympathetic to this position. I came away convinced that "Web Services" was invented by marketing people, and to even coming up with a somewhat specific definition of the term (see http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/NOTE-ws-arch-20040211/#whatis )took a major act of diplomacy. Nevertheless, I kindof like the bit at http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/NOTE-ws-arch-20040211/#SOAP where we talk about SOAP (which is no longer an acronym for anything) being used as both a "Simple Object Access Protocol" and a "Service Oriented Architecture Protocol", and pointing out that SOAP essentially "provides a standard, extensible, composable framework for packaging and exchanging XML messages" in a network-independent manner. The other stuff (like the RPC conventions and datatype encoding) is optional. So, "SOAP" as people define it looking forward is not quite the same as the "SOAP" that we have known for the last couple of years. I have very mixed feelings on what this means about the real success of and benefits for SOAP. On one hand, I agree that there's little concrete today on the Web to point to showing the benefits of SOAP, and the Visual Studio.NET approach of "transparently" exposing ordinary objects as Web services via SOAP and WSDL was, uhh, well "misguided" is about the most polite term that comes to mind :-) On the other hand, even SOAP-RPC is being used effectively in enterprise integration situations where the vendor neutrality, platform neutrality, and protocol neutrality of XML/SOAP is necessary and the support in tools such as VS.NET is very convenient (at least once enterprise developers learn not to shoot themselves in the foot by exposing fine-grained object interfaces as Web services). More importantly, SOAP's header extension and processing model, and the design pattern of using specialized intermediaries to support specific standard headers (such as firewalls that understand WS-Security) is showing real promise as the basis for the defacto standard Web services architecture being laid down by the 800 lb gorillas (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/ dnwebsrv/html/wsoverview.asp ... and the "process document" at http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/offers/WS-Specworkshops/ ). Of course, we shall see if the WS-* stuff actually pays off in practice, but there is an awful lot of energy being poured into it. I sure wouldn't want to bet *against* the value of WS-Security and WSBPEL at this point. 
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