[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Doing Web services right
Mike Champion wrote: > On Wed, 12 Mar 2003 14:09:18 +0000, Bill de hÓra > <bill.dehora@p...> wrote: >> >> The thing is, to do anything interesting, are the users being burdened >> with reinventing protocols? As Geoff Arnold pointed out recently, API >> and protocol design require very different mindsets and approaches. >> Just shipping data around, really means just shipping data around >> /with/ service level agreements. > > > To be honest, this is something I'm having a hard time coming to grips > with. Ok, but you just need to see the way the industry is hovering around a nunber of reliable messaging standards, recent discssion on the W3C ws lists, or at a lower level in Java-land, the SOAP --> Servlet --> JMS idiom, or even SOAP-->ASP-->BizTalk, to realize that shiipping stuff around is a minimal expectation. Assuming the apps can talk, the next thing people want is the data Fedexed. > The RESTifarians make a strong point that every WSDL file defines > a new "protocol", and that ordinary users can't be expected to grasp the > subtleties of protocol design. Getting back to my original point, that > seems like saying that the specific message format that a CGI (or > ASP/JSP/etc.) backend expects is a "protocol." I don't buy the ordinary user excuse too much. But I do know it takes time and effort to craft anything halfway decent in terms of a protocol or MEP above beyond request-response, which contradicts or offsets to a degree the application integration speeds WS are supposed to offer. Maybe the tradeoff is still a good one. But now we're way of the XML chart... > True in the literal > sense of the word "protocol" in English, but I'm not sure it means > anything more than "the minimal expectation by the server of the > information content needed to do its job" (which is my understanding of > the position that folks including Walter Perry and Sean McGrath > advocate). Which is entirely sensible. But we're talking about sequences of messages that don't compose so well from request-response pairs. Reliable sequences can require 5 or more messages for the endpoints to come to agreement. Nobody talks about tranasction-neutral XML databases; maybe that's more obviously dubious. Bill de hÓra
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