At 5:14 PM -0400 4/21/02, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>I can justify message format frameworks as something separate from
>message delivery frameworks, I suppose, but SOAP seems to deliberately
>blur the boundaries of those two things in any event. I'm still seeking
>out the advantages of such blurring.
>
Anybody still listening to this thread?
This was a big can of worms that unexpectedly popped open at the
SD2002 SOAP BOF last week. Some participants were adamant that they
needed to consider and act on the envelope irrespective of the
contents of the body, even if the body was malformed. For example,
they wanted to be able to do forwarding and error reporting rather
than just dropping the malformed message on the floor.
If they're right, and this is a common need, then I have to say, as I
did then and there, that SOAP is fundamentally flawed, and cannot be
repaired. The requirement to mix envelope and body in a single XML
document is irreconcilable with the need to process the envelope
independently of the body. Thus we pound one more nail into SOAP's
coffin.
Interestingly, XML-RPC does not share this problem since it does not
have an envelope.
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