Sam Ruby

Essays:

Expect More

REST + SOAP

Beyond Backlinks

Google's Genius

Neuro Transmitters

Headers and Hrefs

A Gentle Introduction to SOAP

Coping with Change

Manufactured Serendipity

Dealing with Diversity

A Busy Developers Guide to WSDL 1.1

Axis/Radio Interop, Actual and Potential

To Infinity and Beyond: the Quest for SOAP Interoperability

What Object Does SOAP Access?

Sam Ruby
< It's just data >

Updated: 9/1/2002; 7:01:35 PM.

Saturday, March 16, 2002

Patrick Logan: "Blasting a hole" is a good metaphor. A new API should be designed with the holes blasted through. When an API is updated, a hole should be blasted through it to reduce the cost of future upgrades.
9:25:51 PM

This is not a blog.
3:14:18 PM

Wow... within minutes of posting the GI2S, I not only got a link from Dave and helpful suggestions and corrections from Simon Fell and Peter Drayton, but also a clone. I was not previously familiar with Hessian or Burlap... but based on my reading of this weblog alone, I agree with some and disagree with some of the points made. I agree that binary does not equate to complex. But adding a parameter does not necessarily imply implit overloading... it could mean defaults (see Coping with Change for more info). Finally, it appears that these protocols don't have the ability to select the object to access or specify data types - these may be a valid tradeoffs, but represent simplifications at the expense of functionallity.
1:56:07 PM

Sylvain Carle (via A Frog in the Valley) feels compelled to add that extensibility comes at a price: complexity. I would very much like to hear why. This is a serious question. I believe that I have captured all that is required to be known to exploit the extensibility in SOAP in the Gentle Introduction to SOAP that I posted earlier today. It seems to me that one can have both simplicity and extensibility.
12:40:46 PM

Daniel Berlinger's Archipelago: [Question. Why does SOAP seem to have so many incantations like dateCreated xsi:type="xsd:dateTime" (with the magic being "xsi" and "xsd")? How many of these do I have to learn before I can write a useful SOAP call on the back of a napkin? (No motive, just trying to learn).]

The answer to this question is one: technically only the SOAP Envelope namespace is required. My example used xsi and xsd only to make a true apples to apples comparison with XML-RPC. XML-RPC requires type information, SOAP does not. In fact, most vendors discourage or ignore it's use, and truth be told, only provide it because early versions of Apache SOAP required it.

But your question made it clear to me that there are people who are not SOAP developers who are interested in knowing just a wee bit more about how this all works. So I wrote what amounts to a prequel to the Busy Developers Guide to SOAP 1.1 entitled A Gentle Introduction to SOAP. Enjoy!

12:24:42 PM