What do we need to say about message paths?

David Hull <[email protected]> Fri, 01 Dec 2006 14:29:20 -0500
Newsgroups gmane.text.xml.distributed
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Recall that the original impetus for all this discussion was Noah's
question of how to reconcile multiple receivers with the SOAP processing
model, which clearly describes a single message path from sender to
receiver.  Having explored the implications pretty thoroughly by now, I
think the answer is straightforward: There is one message path per receiver.

We may choose to say more, under various circumstances, but I don't
believe we're obligated to.  If we are so obligated (the precedent of
request-response to the contrary), then I'm quite convinced such an
obligation is independent of how many receivers there might be.  In
other words, allowing for 0 .. N receivers does not open significant
issues w.r.t. message paths and the SOAP processing model.