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I've been trying to catch up on this very interesting discussion ...... but
its gone off on so many different threads its tricky to keep track.
The only comment I'll add (as I'm a bit late in getting involved!) is in
response to Dare's post......
I agree that SOAP has a tendancy to be a 'reinvention' of a number of
distributed computing technologies and trying to justify its benefits to
someone who is an advocat of CORBA or RMI or DCOM etc is a challenge to say
the least.
I wouldn't say that SOAP is an improvement over any of these in itself but
what it offers is finally an agreed 'standard' that hopefully will be
globally adopted (whether in its current state or when it has evolved a
little more).
It is political. The CORBAbods don't see why they should adopt RMI, the
RMIbods feel the same about CORBA etc etc ...... so lets invent a completely
new standard so there doesn't appear to be any 'favouritism' towards any of
the established technologies.
This might be a naive view but - something had to give, something had to be
developed that everyone (or the majority) would be fairly happy to use in
order to go someway towards interoperability. That something was SOAP.
Maybe not the best solutions, not the worst, just the one that happened to
come out on top.
But of course thats purely my opinion :)
Caroline Clewlow
IT Analyst
QinetiQ
Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> In hindsight this post seems rude so I'll expand on it.
>
> Hello Dave, I'd like to start of by saying that the people on this list
> aren't stupid. Thus bandying about cute marketting friendly terms like
> "interop" when asked by technical people what SOAP brings to the table
> doesn't cut it.
>
> Any commonly agreed upon format can be used to guarantee interop. For
> instance, there is nothing so fantastic about our beloved XML that
> S-expressions or CSVs couldn't be made to do if there was as big a push
> for standards and interoperability as there is for XML.
>
> For an example of exactly what kind of interop SOAP buys I suggest
> reading Sam Ruby's "To infinity and beyond - the quest for SOAP
> interoperability"[0] which highlights holes in the SOAP interoperability
> story. Granted they are edge cases but they do indicate that simply
> bandying the term interop around without a frame of reference does not
> lead to clear-cut answers.
>
> There are political as well as technological reasons for the rise of
> SOAP. What I (and I assume many others on this list) would like to hear
> are the technological advantages of SOAP over what existed before,
> currently exists, or could exist if SOAP was not the hot XML buzzword of
> the week.
>
> So far SOAP and its associated technologies, seems like a reinvention of
> several distributed computing wheels. So far we have a commonly agreed
> upon IDL and a wire protocol. IBM, MSFT and others are working on adding
> the layers above this. The one benefit is that now that we have the
> entire industry backing this as opposed to MS vs. Sun vs. IBM vs. the
> rest of the industry we can finally achieve true interop.
>
> However, this is political and I'm sure there must be some technical
> pros to SOAP as well. What I'd like is to hear some well reasoned
> techical arguments for SOAP.
>
> [0]
> http://radio.weblogs.com/0101679/stories/2002/02/01/toInfinityAndBeyondT
> heQuestForSoapInteroperability.html
>
> --
> PITHY WORDS OF WISDOM
> Your successes will happen in private and your failures in full view of
> everyone.
>
> This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
> rights.
> You assume all risk for your use. (c) 2002 Microsoft Corporation. All
> rights reserved.
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Dare Obasanjo [mailto:dareo@microsoft.com]
> > Sent: Monday, April 22, 2002 10:58 AM
> > To: Dave Winer; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> > Subject: RE: [xml-dev] What does SOAP really add?
> >
> >
> > Uh, sure. Without reading your response I'd like to say
> > *cough* whatever
> > *cough*
> >
> > --
> > PITHY WORDS OF WISDOM
> > Your successes will happen in private and your failures in
> > full view of everyone.
> >
> > This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and
> > confers no rights.
> > You assume all risk for your use. (c) 2002 Microsoft
> > Corporation. All rights reserved.
> >
> >
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Dave Winer [mailto:dave@userland.com]
> > > Sent: Monday, April 22, 2002 10:56 AM
> > > To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> > > Subject: Re: [xml-dev] What does SOAP really add?
> > >
> > >
> > > Without having read most of the messages in this thread, I'd
> > > like to try to answer the question it raises.
> > >
> > > 1. Interop.
> > >
> > > Dave
> > >
> > >
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