October 26, 2007

The more things change...

Technology moves quickly? bah!

From: Stuart Charlton <stuartcharlton@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: [dist-obj] Was Souls, Now S2S, P2P.. Web Services
Date: February 28, 2001 5:26:53 PM EST (CA)
To: Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>
Cc: dist-obj@distributedcoalition.org

> Stu!

Mark!

> It looks to me like you're only considering the RPC use of SOAP. SOAP
> is so much more than RPC, but also so much less than a lot of people
> think. For instance, SOAP defines no application semantics. It relies
> on an application protocol to do that, such as HTTP. Almost all of the
> benefit that is attributed to SOAP in the press, is made possible by
> HTTP. In fact, you don't even need SOAP. All it adds is;

Yes. I did an "XML messaging without SOAP" project back in September when I
was running the "new hires" training program for a Wall Street bank.

We really didn't want to use a CORBA/COM bridge to talk have VB talk to our
Enterprise JavaBeans. Most of the "ease of development" came out of HTTP.
We created a generic-data DTD (simplified XML-Data), and a simple invocation
DTD and would basically call / query our beans using a very thin servlet
that did reflective calls on the beans. We put an IE component inside our
VB application to render our data using XSL.

Didn't need SOAP then, don't (really) need it now. :) But it seems to be
the direction everyone's moving in...

[snip]

Cheers
Stu

Posted by stu at October 26, 2007 04:55 PM