Re: Web Service 'IPersist' Interface?

On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 02:38:35PM -0700, David Ing wrote:
> Thanks for the reply. Had a think about that and come up with this -
>
> Is there any merit in the arguement that there should be a 'XSD based spec'
> for these types of operations rather than HTTP/1.1 methods? This would:

I'm not sure what you mean by "XSD based spec", so it's hard to say.
You mean XML Schema datatypes, I assume?  How would those replace
HTTP methods?

> (1) Help people discover that these type of operations would be supported
> through WSDL.

Sure, you could specify HTTP methods or equivalents in WSDL.  I guess
the question would be, why? 8-) WSDL is a design-time artifact, whereas
you know that a resource is an HTTP resource at runtime, by looking
at the URI scheme. e.g. if you see http://www.yahoo.com, you know that
you can use HTTP methods, or if you see ftp://example.org/foo.zip, you
know that you can use FTP methods.  Very different than with WSDL, where
you have to know the type of the service *before* you invoke the
methods.  It's a much earlier form of binding than the Web uses.

> (2) Evolve in a controlled manner (its a schema and we're all carefully
> ignoring version issues for 1.0 land <g>).

I'd need to understand your XSD comment above to answer this one.

> (3) Be consistent with my other SOAP method calls on the service (important
> one for me).

I guess this relates to the comment in your other message, about having
trouble reconciling the document-centric use of HTTP and its methods,
with the RPC use of SOAP.  It *should* be difficult to do this, because
the two approaches are mostly at odds with one another, especially when
the common use of SOAP, and the libraries that support this use, eschews
the use of URIs.

> (4) Be *so* much more fashionable to today's young people than HTTP1.1 <bg>

LOL 8-)

BTW, I should state a disclaimer; I think that Web services are a huge
waste of time, and that they completely disregard pretty much all of the
important contributions that the Web has made to the design of large
scale distributed systems.  So hearing me espouse the value of using
HTTP's methods (and extension methods) shouldn't be too surprising;
I'm like a broken record in that way. 8-)

MB
--
Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile (formerly Planetfred)
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.               [email protected]
http://www.markbaker.ca        http://www.idokorro.com

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