xml-dev - RE: What is XP?

[Michael Brennan <Michael_Brennan@Allegis.com>]

Thanks for passing this reference along. I am pleased with the statements
made. Overall they seem technically accurate and provide a more balanced and
fair perspective than some of the statements from Sun representatives I've
seen quoted before.

I would be more pleased and encouraged, though, if Sun were pursuing a more
generalized XML messaging API with it's "M Project" rather than focusing so
exclusively on ebXML. Support for ebXML is valuable and sensible. But Sun
has a track record of providing more modular and flexible APIs in the Java
platform, allowing different service providers to be plugged in to support
different protocols with the same client APIs. The M Project, in contrast,
seems to be taking a much narrower and more constrained approach (at least
as far as I can tell from what is currently publicly available). Citing the
fact that SOAP is not an international standard doesn't seem to me to be a
good reason for not supporting it. SAX is not an international standard,
either, but Sun wisely supports it in JAXP.

If Sun were to provide a more generalized XML messaging API that supported
different protocols to be "plugged in" (including both SOAP and ebXML), I
think that would be a valuable contribution to the development community. I
hope Sun and its collaborators on that effort will take that into
consideration. Certainly, ebXML is more suitable for B2B ecommerce at this
stage, but SOAP has substantially greater momentum and developer mindshare
for application integration. We have yet to have any of our customers or
partners indicate a desire to integrate with us via ebXML, but we have
already had a couple of partners want to integrate with us via SOAP (and we
are providing that option for them).

It would also be valuable if Sun provided a more robust foundation for XML
messaging than that currently afforded by the Java platform. The HTTP
support that is standard in Java, for instance, suffers from antiquated
protocol support and some significant design flaws making XML messaging
problematic and proper SOAP support impossible. Fortunately, Sun's Open
Source Brazil project has an HTTP implementation that solves the key
problems. I'd love to see some of that work make it into the Java platform
(and I'd love to see Sun provide SSL support in that class, and support for
content streaming in chunked encoding form rather than requiring that
everything being sent in a request be buffered up front in memory).

With that said, though, thanks for sharing the statements. I am encouraged
by them and look forward to seeing what comes out of Sun's efforts in this
arena.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eve L. Maler [mailto:eve.maler@east.sun.com]
> Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2000 9:54 AM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: RE: What is XP?
> 
> 
> 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