Disclaimer: the views expressed on this site do not nessecarily reflect those of my employer
Friday, December 20, 2002
Wow, nobody told me about this nifty GWS page on www.groove.net. We even have this nifty graphic diagrams and stuff. And a white paper! It often doesn't occur to me to surf our own web site, but I often learn quite a lot there!
6:54:38 PM
Back in the saddle! I've been on the bike 6 of the last 7 days (had to blow it off on Monday when it was snowing). Dress appropriately and ride effectively and you can get out any time of the year. Next week the real training program starts up again. Fun fun fun. No more ice cream or beer for me!
6:49:57 PM
Tim Knip shares his first epxerience with the GWS Beta and attempts to do Radio integration. Dave Winer argues that Radio came first so Groove has to interoperate. Which implementation came first is irrelevant. From the BDG page:
Strict standards compliance. Where this specification is not in compliance with the SOAP 1.1 specification, or the XML 1.0 specification, as of 4/2/01, this specification will change.
If its true that Radio doesn't support Soap headers in any shape or form, then I really can't accept that this is my short coming. Haven't headers been an integral part of a SOAP envelope for a while now? All the WS-I specs use them extensively. I'm honestly hoping that its just undocumented in Radio or Tim didn't find the right way to enable it. I honestly haven't even tried so I'm grateful to Tim for cutting his teeth on this problem. As much as I've tried to do anything more with Radio than blog I can't. I'm just too thick I guess.
Without wanting to start a huge flame war around this issue I'd like to boil it down as I see it now:
1. Groove's Web Services APIs require the use of a SOAP header for security purposes. We thought of ways to avoid this, but the problem is that there was no easy way (unless you're on XP) to detect the user ID of a process that connects to your socket.
2. Radio supports SOAP but not SOAP headers? Can anyone confirm or deny? Tim says, "nope". Dave says, "We implement a standard SOAP stack". But that doesn't definitively answer the question.
If Radio doesn't support headers then either: a) its Groove's fault because we should have designed our system to interop with Radio, or b) its Radio's fault and Radio shouldn't claim to be SOAP 1.1. I'm not willing to remove the requirement for headers (even if I could) just because Radio doesn't support them. Sorry Dave. I'm really glad that Tim found a way around this though, and he is doing some amazingly cool integration.
BTW: the HTTP 1.1 / 1.0 issues were caused by a bug in our code that has been fixed. HTTP 1.0 clients are fine with GWS, as long as they can send a SOAP header!
Lastly, I'd like the flamers of the 'net to remember that GWS is still a beta product. It is not even a public Beta. So don't jump to conclusions yet about how we didn't do something right because we haven't really done it yet! If we can make it any easier to interop with Radio we will. Rest assured, we know that interop is what its all about and that is our biggest priority. On the other hand, we want and need to use certain features. We're about to get to SOAP 1.2, so anyone claiming to be SOAP should consider at least fully supporting 1.1. Its not that hard!
Wow, nobody told me about this nifty 