[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Web Service: SOAP or {HTML + Servlets}?
On Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 05:17:22PM -0400, Roger L. Costello wrote: > Hi Folks, > > I have been looking at SOAP recently. Although its great fun to play > with new technologies, I am struggling to see why I should recommend to > my clients that they use SOAP rather than, say, HTML plus Java Servlets > (or CGI, JSP, ASP, etc) to implement Web Services. Boy, I bet this one is going to generate some discussion! I had better get in early! :-) :-) :-) I won't go through a blow by blow discussion on your points. They all make sense etc. Just a few things I think are worth pointing out. SOAP describes encoding/decoding of packets. You don't have to use SOAP with HTTP. It can be (and is being) used over other communication mechanisms, such as email. Going back to SOAP over HTTP however, why use it instead of servlets? Well, this does not seem to be quite the right questions to me if I understand it. Please note I am not a servlet expert! I thought you could use servlets to implement SOAP. Servlets I thought were more of an implementation technology, not a protocol. SOAP talks about how to encode packets etc, not implementation. Maybe you are refering more to the standard way people send data to/from Java servlets rather than the technology itself? Is there a standard way to encode such requests that is used across a range of languages? But to me the attraction of SOAP is a purely practical one. Forget all the technology arguments. SOAP toolkits either exist or under development for a wide range of languages/environments: COM, .NET, Java, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Ace, TCL, C++, ... The simple fact that .NET uses SOAP means great interopability possibilities in the near future. Now I think SOAP has some real and serious warts: sparse arrays, href attributes, and no standard session management over HTTP (although I think cookies will be the norm here). But SOAP is still new. And the potential for wide range interoperability across systems is the real win. Alan
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