Re: [xml-dev] What does SOAP really add?

["Dave Winer" <dave@userland.com>]

OK, let's take this one step at a time.

1. If others were shut out I didn't hear from them. Usually people scream in
an unmistakeable way when that happens, they don't usually go quietly. This
may be an exception to that.

2. I think of SOAP as glue for connecting scripting environments. Always
have. You may think of SOAP as something else. I'm only now getting that
this has been a source of disagreement, even with people we collaborated
with. Often we don't patiently explore the assumptions others are making. It
leads to disconnects.

3. I liked the Google XML interface. I'm sorry it's behind a firewall now. I
have tried, several times, in private exchanges with Google people, to get
them to reinstate it, or at least let me try to program against it in test
mode to see what it's capabilities are. In the middle of the last effort,
they showed us the SOAP API. We got busy when that happened.

Dave



----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Prescod" <paul@prescod.net>
To: "Dave Winer" <dave@userland.com>
Cc: <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
Sent: Monday, April 22, 2002 1:54 PM
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] What does SOAP really add?


> Dave Winer wrote:
> >
> > All that matters to me is if it worked, and it clearly did. There were
apps
> > written in most major programming environments that connected to Google
> > through the SOAP API within a matter of hours. No one reported any
interop
> > glitches. Could they have done it another way? Of course. So what. Dave
>
> You didn't hear the XSLT programmers complaining about interop glitches
> because they were completely and totally shut out. A year ago Google had
> an API that was compatible both with FrontierScript AND with XSLT (to
> say nothing of XInclude, RDF and wget). It was also more efficient,
> simpler and easier to use to boot. In my opinion, that's "so what".
>
>  Paul Prescod