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Re: Traditional RPC

• To: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
• Subject: Re: Traditional RPC
• From: Francis Norton <francis@r...>
• Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2002 17:44:22 +0000
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• References: <2C61CCE8A870D211A523080009B94E4306FEE8BF@HQ5> <3C72620A.7B0DB82E@p...>
• Reply-to: francis@r...
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011019 Netscape6/6.2

Paul Prescod wrote:
 >
 > Today I step through some Expedia forms to buy an airline ticket, or
 >  to buy a book from Amazon. Tomorrow I write a Python program to
 > step through for me. It demonstrably works, even with plain old
 > HTML. I know it works because I do it!
 >
And how many hours does it take to do it? And how fragile is it, because 
you're reading something which is meant to be read by humans, not programs?

Or if you are talking XML, how much time will you spend agreeing your 
own little XML protocol with Expedia or Amazon? Will you send your query 
as GET parameters and force the server to institute lots of state 
management so you can build the query up call by call rather than 
sending an entire XML query in one block? Or if you use POST, what CGI 
variable will you use to hold the query block? Or will you just send one 
naked XML block? How will they document what elements they expect to 
receive and send?

Why not get productive, do it the XML way? Why not write an XML grammar 
which answers all these questions, and an XML protocol to implement the 
transport? Why not call them WSDL and SOAP?

I can "Add Web Reference" in Visual Studio in about a minute. Leave out 
the obvious assigment statements to and from my query and result 
structures, and it takes me two lines of code to do a synchronous WS 
call, three to do it async. And I'm sure the Java guys aren't far behind.

Some of it's a bit new and rough, but no-one has yet persuaded me that 
there are any show-stopping flaws in it.

I really don't understand what you're offering as an alternative to WS. 
If it's Python and HTTP GET then I think I can see cavalry charging the 
tanks again.

Francis.

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• References:
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    • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
  • Re: Traditional RPC
    • From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>

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