Re: So what do SOAP and XML-RPC buy you? (was Re: Massive Cross-P ost:The State of XML-RPC, April 2001)

[Ken MacLeod <ken@bitsko.slc.ut.us>]

"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com> writes:

> Ummm.... idiot question.  Do I really want to send anyObject and
> marshall/unmarshall that, or just a message?  It seems in the past
> that when one starts sending anyObject, a hairball of dependencies
> is incurred.  This makes the scheme something possibly heavier than
> what is wanted.  At what point am I packing up a very big hairball
> and trying to mail it to a receiver when really, I want them to do a
> bit of work by request and send me the results, not create an exe
> and mail it back.  In other words, where does service and
> persistence blur?

At the edges?  ;-)

HTTP, already in this context, shows the blur.

When you're doing an http.put() or http.get(), you're talking
persistance (typically).  When you're doing an http.post(), you're
talking service (typically).  How big the hairball is depends on the
application, and is orthogonal to the marshalling.

The only unique* component here is that the data passed as the content
are represented in the calling language as compound/complex objects
conforming to [little-s] schemas rather than streams of mime content.

  -- Ken

* Not really new at all, just still not common in HTTP libraries.