[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: SOAP and the Web
On Thu, 2002-04-25 at 21:29, Mike Deem wrote: > > From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@s...] > > > > On Thu, 2002-04-25 at 20:33, Mike Deem wrote: > > > My technical argument is this: all that matters when using SOAP is > XML > > > and all the power of XML can be leveraged when building applications > > > that use SOAP. > > > > You don't need SOAP to leverage XML. If all that matters when using > > SOAP is XML, I'll take my XML straight up, thanks. > > But an URI with an HTTP GET isn't XML. I think you have a very strange notion of what XML is. > If you are doing HTTP POST (or SMTP, FTP, or any other protocol that > moves data from one socket to another) with XML content, you are almost > there. > > Now, suppose you want to include a digital signature with the message. > This signature really should not be part of core message content itself > (you should not have to change the schema for this content to include > the signature). You need some mechanism to separate this extra > information from the core message content. There are also these fancy features called HTTP headers, or, if I really wanted to get creative, new protocol frameworks like BEEP that offer a much more sophisticated set of tools for integrating additional information. > SOAP does this with an envelope that contains the core content (the > body), and the extra information (the headers) in a well defined > structure. Having this well defined structure, and the well defined > processing model behind it, is also a technical advantage of SOAP. > > Yes, SOAP does mix the message (body) and the envelope/headers. The > inconvenience this causes in some cases is, IMO, made up for by the fact > that the *entire* message is still just XML. I'm sorry, Mike. I asked for a technical defense of SOAP. This is just a feature-list with no comparison to other technical alternatives. I send messages whose entire content is "still just XML" all the time, quite happily, with no SOAP suds. I can live with the occasional HTTP header, if necessary. Heck - some people even represent headers as XML behind the scenes, for their own convenience. It's not that hard to do, or that exciting a project. I have a really hard time taking the envelopes-mashed-with-messages story seriously. Maybe it makes them handy payloads for shifting between transports, but those wrappers inflict their own costs. -- Simon St.Laurent Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets Errors, errors, all fall down! http://simonstl.com
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