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Thursday, July 03, 2003 |
New SOAP Reinvents Distributed Computing via Aspect-Oriented Messaging. Recently, the W3C ratified SOAP v1.2 as a Recommendation, which gives SOAP the status of an official Web standard for the first time. SOAP has come a long way since late 1999, when META predicted its ubiquity and recommended it as a "quick and dirty" approach to low-end B2B integration. SOAP v1.2 makes abundantly clear that SOAP is intended to be far more than a primitive XML-RPC mechanism. SOAP provides the foundation for a completely new style of distributed computing based on a lightweight, extensible, distributed protocol for exchanging and processing structured information via user-extensible message exchange patterns (MEPs), user-extensible message (header) processing models, and user-extensible bindings to exchange (e.g., HTTP, SMTP) and execution (e.g., J2EE, .Net) technologies. SOAP v1.2 makes two fundamental revisions to SOAP v1.1 to make it even quicker, but also a lot cleaner and more broadly applicable. First, v1.2 is based on the W3C XML Infoset standard, which effectively supercedes XML 1.0 as the language for defining XML-based standards. Because SOAP is defined in terms of the Infoset's abstract data set, it is free to use diverse serializations besides the verbose XML 1.0 angle-bracket (</XML>) representation, including compact binary representations. This change effectively eliminates any limitations on the use of SOAP due to bandwidth concerns. Second, v1.2 provides a much simpler and more powerful aspect-oriented mechanism for extending the SOAP processing model. New aspect-oriented features can be added to SOAP by defining additional SOAP headers and how to process them. Such features can range from transport-level features such as security and reliable messaging to business-level features such as spending-policy enforcement to personalization and differentiated service. Bottom Line: Users who consider SOAP to be just a low-level RPC mechanism should review SOAP v1.2 to understand its potentially profound architectural implications for distributed computing.
5:54:18 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Nicholas Gall.
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