RE: Visibility (was Re: Introducing the Service Oriented Architec tural style, and it's constraints and properties.

>  
>  
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Baker [mailto:[email protected]] 
> Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 10:25 PM
> To: Champion, Mike
> Cc: [email protected]
> 

> As Dave points out, and I did before him, it's the methods 
> that matter the most for the purposes of visibility, not the headers.

And as I've argued on several occasions, that's the 1997-vintage model of
firewalls, not necessarily the 2003 or 2010 model of firewalls.  A number of
people who appear to be knowledgeable about firewalls have "+1"-ed my
arguments, and I haven't seen anyone but yourself push back on them.  You
may wish to elaborate.

> 
> > So again, I agree that "visibility" is an important 
> property, but what 
> > powers it is *standards*, not just HTTP.
> 
> So where are the standard Web service APIs?

Huh? APIs??? FWIW, I was thinking of standards for the format of a message
such as XML (duh), Xpath (to let an intermediary inspect an arbitrary
section of a message, be it in a SOAP header, the SOAP body, or the
payload), specific SOAP header/processing [proto]-standards such as
WS-Security, WS-Routing, XACML, etc. and content specs such as XBRL, UBL,
various bits of ebXML, and so on.  

Any standards that you can use to explain to a stupid machine what to look
for in a message and how to use its value in a routing/filtering/cacheing
decision enhance "visibility" IMHO.