RE: "Uh, what do I need this for" (was RE: XML.COM: How I Learne d toLove daBomb)

[Michael Brennan <Michael_Brennan@allegis.com>]

> From: Edd Dumbill [mailto:edd@usefulinc.com]

<snip/>

> It's this development which is precisely the most revealing, 
> imho -- COM
> writ large.  Everyone's very keen to tell me it's not about RPC but I
> find the use cases and direction of the technology point otherwise.

The RPC use case is very popular and will continue to be very popular,
precisely because that use is appealing to developers who don't use XML
today and don't want to. They merely seek a cheap and easy way to get their
applications to talk to other applications on the internet.

But there are also plenty of uses out there that are not using RPC. ebXML
has adopted SOAP as its foundation, and there are already plenty of
developers out there sending arbitrary XML documents in SOAP envelopes. It
is also worth noting that even in the case of RPC, it is still just XML over
the wire. That means that just because one end of the connection thinks it
is doing RPC, that doesn't mean that is really the case. Systems that are
not using RPC can still expose an RPC-like interface for the benefit of
developers who would prefer to work at the level of service proxies with
meaningful methods that operate on domain-specific objects. That is an
approach we are using today.