Updated: 9/21/2006; 6:11:53 AM.
Nick Gall's Weblog
[NOTE: I have moved. My new blog is ironick.typepad.com.]
        

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      

© Copyright 2006 Nicholas Gall.
 
July 2003
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31    
Jun   Aug



Latest Interesting Pages Furled

Full Archive of Furled Pages

Subscribe to my Furl Archive

Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website.



Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.

My Latest Blog Postings

Powered by: