Friday, August 23, 2002

I would actually be quite happy to rename operation to something else more meaningful to what it is looking to accomplish, at the very least it would help clear some confusion.  Port Types look TOO much like Interface descriptions rather than like abstract descriptions of generic message exchanges and that's exactly how they've been interpreted and used in the vast majority of cases. [snellspace] I'm all for renaming things to make things clearer. Unfortunately getting agreement on new names is not easy (see the endless discussions in the WS Architecture WG mailing list for example) - so I'm not too inclined to pushing it without convincing arguments in hand. 9:44:58 PM

Document vs RPC language bindings. I definitely agree with the second statement, and am curious as to how you think the language bindings can be improved?  To help with this discussion, I've written a small script which generates eight different wsdls and captured the generated client and server code. [Sam Ruby] The Axis generated bindings look very good, except for two cases: {document,rpc}/encoded/element .. those should result in the same stub/skel signatures! Basically the point is that the signatures should only be dependent on the abstract part of WSDL (message/operation/portType) and hence should be totally independent of any binding choices. Axis guys have gone to lots of pain on this stuff; great work!! 9:01:25 PM

I just posted a story with some pictures of our trip. Enjoy! 8:30:35 PM

We just got back from a 5-day vacation in the Polonnaruwa area, Sri Lanka's capital from 11th to the 13th century AD. Along the way we stopped by at the Dambulla Rock Temple, which was built around the 1st century BC. What an amazing place. We stayed for 4 days at the Giritale Hotel (where monkeys and deer were everywhere) and the last day at the Deer Park Hotel (check out their site .. its a beautiful place!).  On Wednesday evening we went to the Minneriya National Park and saw more than 100 elephants!! Wow, that was amazing. I'll post some pictures as soon as I figure out how .. 2:21:12 PM

OK so I'm still new to this blogging thing .. how do I get Keith's RSS feed address? Dumb in blogger land. 9:42:49 AM

"There is very little reason for folks to quibble over programming models when the choice is rpc/enc or rpc/lit, but the difference between doc and rpc is clear, it's the choice between send(document) vs someOperation(parameters[]).  The programming model does matter." [snellspace] I disagree there's a difference between doc and rpc. Your comment shows that you're paying too much attention to the fact that that WSDL portTypes have an element call <operation> with a name. Let's rename that to "<interaction>" with an optional name for now. The reason the name was put in was so that you could refer to it later for bindings. However, there was NEVER any intent that the name would actually show up in the actual wire message. So, again we're down to "how do you want to program to that service?" Some like to program with XML directly - so then generate a send(org.w3c.dom.Document) method. If you want to deal with language objects, map that schema to a language type and generate a method that has that as an argument. What's the difference between the two? None, I maintain. Note that only the SOAP binding of WSDL distinguishes between RPC vs. Document. That's partly the reason that I think the WSDL 1.1 SOAP binding is quite broken! (I'm ignoring the "parameterOrder" crap thing that was an SDLism that crept into WSDL; I'm hoping WSDL 1.2 will just drop that totally.)   9:37:04 AM

© Copyright 2002 Sanjiva Weerawarana.