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Mike Champion wrote,
> I guess my question is, "If HTTP is so general, why are vendors such
> as BEA, Tibco, Progress, etc. moving to other protocols to "ensure
> delivery of XML documents" via web services? It's easy to agree
> with Mark Baker (especially after browsing the REST Wiki) that in
> principle HTTP is a 99/1 solution for internet communications, so
> why is the world backing away from this in practice?
Because HTTP isn't any such thing. HTTP is a synchronous, point to
point, almost realtime, online protocol. That's inappropriate for huge
classes of real world transactions.
As an simple example, take any business transaction more long-winded
than typing in credit card number, hitting a submit button and getting
a near instant response. Perhaps the transaction has to be approved by
a person, so processing takes a couple of hours (maybe much longer if
it arrives late on a Friday evening). What might the requestor want to
do in the interim? Disconnect from the network? Move to a different
endpoint? Or perhaps there's a network partition during the
transaction, or an unfriendly intermediary decides to time out an
apparently idle connection.
HTTP just wasn't designed for that kind of communication model.
Cheers,
Miles
--
Miles Sabin InterX
Internet Systems Architect 27 Great West Road
+44 (0)20 8817 4030 Middx, TW8 9AS, UK
msabin@interx.com http://www.interx.com/
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