Re: SOAP and Cacheability

On Tue, 19 Apr 2011, Dan Brickley wrote:

> On 19 April 2011 16:56, Noah Mendelsohn <[email protected]> wrote:
>> My impression is that the major vendors aren't doing a whole lot to enha=
nce
>> their SOAP stacks at this point, but I could be wrong about that. More t=
o
>> the point, they seem not to have been convinced that the RESTful variant=
 was
>> worth the trouble then, and since then there's been a lot of deployment =
that
>> just uses POST.
>>
>> Frankly, I think a lot of the use cases where one might have considered =
use
>> of RESTful SOAP are now JSON, and I'd be disinclined to fight that trend=
=2E
>> The pros and cons are ultimately somewhat subtle in principle (e.g.
>> documents vs. just data), but in practice this is where everyone is goin=
g,
>> and mostly works, and for the data-only cases it's convenient. So, I'm
>> doubtful much is going to happen on the SOAP side.
>
> Thanks, that lines up with my impression too, but I don't follow SOAP
> so closely. A lot of the noise and excitement has moved on elsewhere,
> but there must still be a lot of SOAP around... ...not to mentions
> lessons to be learned.

We tried to provide real endpoints serving SOAP/1.2 using GET, namely=20
validators, see [1],[2], along with WSDL2 definitions. I know that it has=
=20
been used by third party tools, like browser extensions, but I would bet=20
that those are not using WS toolkits and are using the SOAP output as=20
plain XML. It amounts to roughly 70khits/day for the CSS validator.

[1] http://validator.w3.org/docs/api.html
[2] http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/api.html

> One reason to ask is that in the new RDF WG we have a chartered
> deliverable around JSON (http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/wiki/TF-JSON)
> and it's reminding me of the discussions from a while back around SOAP
> Encoding, since both that and JSON provide a kind of quick and
> convenient way of dumping and restoring programmatic objects without a
> formal schema. Some of the same issues crop up: if Web services are
> using JSON (or SOAP encoding) to talk to each other, how are those
> structures best defined and documented?

Most toolkits are generating stubs from the XML schema type definition,=20
more than validating input in messages, and it led to discrepancy between=
=20
implementations and language used (see http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-patte=
rns/ )
There will be corner cases as well in the JSON world, even if it is=20
schema-less, but it might be easier to identify and fix discrepancies than=
=20
if there are toolkits involved.

> But I'm offtopic from the original query. Nice to see some traffic on
> xml-dist-app though, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/
> plots the rise and fall of discussions -- things were last in double
> figures monthly in July 2007...
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>

--=20
Baroula que barouleras, au ti=C3=A9u toujou t'entourneras.

         ~~Yves