Re: [xml-dev] Web Service: SOAP or {HTML + Servlets}?

[Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>]

> I think I agree: SOAP is a wire format, not a "protocol" --  SOAP 1.2 is not
> an acronym, and explicitly separates out RPC as a use case -- so it should
> be useful for document-based transactions as well as RPC. 

The choice to deprecate the expansion of the acronym didn't have anything
to do with SOAP not being a protocol.  SOAP *is* a protocol, just a
particularly bizarre one that goes around extending other protocols
(not just tunneling over them).  What might help explain this is to note
that part of SOAP's legacy (through the contributions of Henrik Frystyk
Nielsen) derives from an obscure effort out of the W3C a few years ago
called PEP, the Protocol Extension Protocol.  See;

http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-http-pep 

> I've seen very little discussion of what seems to be like an alternative
> paradigm to RPC for "document-based transactions" : Tuple Spaces / TSpaces /
> JavaSpaces / XML Spaces. See
> http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/TSpaces/: 
> http://www.sun.com/jini/specs/jini1.1html/js-title.html
> http://uncled.oit.unc.edu/XML/XMLSpaces.html 
> http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac00/Proceed/FinalPapers/CM-41/ 

AFAIK, I was the first person to describe the similarities between
tuple spaces and REST, the architecture of the Web.

See;

http://internet.conveyor.com/RESTwiki/moin.cgi/TupleSpaces
http://internet.conveyor.com/RESTwiki/moin.cgi/RestArchitecturalStyle

> This seems like a better architecture for multi-way "web service"
> transactions over unreliable connections (e.g., to mobile devices) than RPC.
> Why does this idea have so little mindshare?  Am I missing something here,
> or might this be the Next Big Thing after the limitations of RPC in a
> high-latency, unreliable networking environment become obvious?  

As manifested in HTTP and URIs, it remains the Current Big Thing.

MB