xml-dev - Re: SOAP, plague, love

["Dave Winer" <dave@userland.com>]

BTW, Coffee's comments are utterly irresponsible.

"That is a choice that no firewall can keep you from making, unless a
network administrator applies draconian measures such as barring all e-mail
other than simple ASCII text files -- and even this defense is bypassed by
Microsoft's proposed XML-based Simple Object Access Protocol, whose
active-content messages are expressed in streams of what looks like simple
text."

Yes, XML-RPC messages look like simple text, but they don't come to your
mail client, they come to your HTTP server.

Not running an HTTP server? Then you'll never get one.

Can a firewall administrator block SOAP and XML-RPC messages? Absolutely.

In fact, our experience with Pike, which is the first desktop app that
depends on XML-RPC, is that you cannot use it from behind a firewall to
author content for a site that's outside your firewall because the messages
will not typically get through.

We've written an advisory on this, from the day it was released (when the
xml-dev list was misbehaving) that I think proves the fallacy of Coffee's
comments, and others I've heard elsewhere.

http://pikebeta.userland.com/firewalls

In real-world experience, in 2000, not the past, not the future, firewalls
are set by default to not allow this kind of traffic.

We have not yet deployed a SOAP implementation but I'm almost 100 percent
sure that the same experience will be echoed when we do.

The key is to respect the firewalls, not try to sneak around them, and let
the system work as it was designed to.

Dave



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