xml-dev - RE: What is XP?

["Eve L. Maler" <eve.maler@east.sun.com>]

Since Sun was mentioned in this thread as "disparaging SOAP," I thought it 
would be useful to point to a recent post on the Apache soap-user list 
wherein our position is laid out comprehensively:

   http://archive.covalent.net/xml/soap-user/2000/12/0163.xml

Happy holidays,

         Eve

At 01:50 PM 12/15/00 -0800, Michael Brennan wrote:
>Well, there was a debate about this on the xml-dist-app list. Since I
>followed that debate with interest, I'll pretend that's what we are all
>talking about rather than eXtreme Programming. :-)
>
>ebXML has tried to solve a larger set of problems than SOAP. SOAP takes a
>minimalist approach. It defines a very simple XML-based messaging protocol.
>It explicitly doesn't address issues such as security, reliable delivery of
>messages, etc. These latter issues are critical to ecommerce, but the SOAP
>philosophy is to build something simple and minimalistic, but also
>extensible so solutions to these other issues can be addressed with other
>specs and layered on top of SOAP. ebXML, in contrast, tries to tackle all of
>these issues up front, as well as support for sending arbitrary binary data.
>(ebXML uses MIME/multipart format for the outer envelope, not XML.)
>
>Some (such as Sun) continue to disparage SOAP and point out there are too
>many issues it doesn't solve. Sun touts ebXML as a more robust alternative
>to SOAP. Those who defend SOAP rightly point out that this misses the whole
>point; other capabilities can be layered on top of SOAP. In addition, some
>have characterized ebXML as too heavyweight for simple uses. ebXML defenders
>point out that you don't have to use everything ebXML offers, and it can be
>used for lightweight messaging as well (although I don't think ebXML
>provides an RPC mapping like SOAP does).
>
>In the debate on the xml-dist-app list there seemed to be consensus that
>convergence is both feasible and desirable. Those affiliated with the ebXML
>effort seemed to agree that ebXML could be implemented as a layer on top of
>SOAP. Furthermore, the charter of the XP working group (and the sentiments
>generally expressed by the participants) is consistent with the SOAP
>philosophy: develop a minimalist protocol that is good enough for the simple
>cases and serves as a suitable substrate for the more complex cases.
>However, since they are still in the requirements phase, we still have quite
>a ways to go before we know what XP will look like.
>
>As anyone can probably tell, I'm taking a great interest in this activity.
>Partly because it has immediate relevance to the work I am doing with XML;
>but it is also  certainly facinating watching how the XML world is evolving,
>isn't it?
>
>The other aspect of this I have great interest in is the emergence of
>data-binding tools that leverage XSD (or other schema languages). If anyone
>encounters (or develops) cool tools for this, please share the info with the
>list -- or at least with me. :-)

--
Eve Maler                                          +1 781 442 3190
Sun Microsystems XML Technology Center    eve.maler @ east.sun.com