Re: how bad is soap?

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>]

>>>>> Patrick R Gili writes:

Patrick> I don't think its a matter of complexity so much as a matter
Patrick> of return on the investment.

Interoperability with _existing_ implementations is I think a good
return on investment, but your mileage might vary.

Patrick> First, the SOAP header can become quite large and verbose.

I believe the SOAP header will be small relative to the data portion
if we continue the approach to move configurations around as opaque
XML or text blobs with a rather limited set of operations.

Patrick> Second, one of the reasons for using XML is
Patrick> human-readability; that is, it eases the process of
Patrick> development, debugging and maintenance without requiring
Patrick> special tools and utilities.  Have you tried to read a SOAP
Patrick> header lately?  Argh.

SOAP uses XML for the encoding - do you see the contradiction in your
statement? Anyway, looking at the examples in <http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/>,
I am not yet sure that the header has much more complexity compared to
what xmlconf might end up with (unless xmlconf decides to ignore
namespaces, which might be a mistake).

But yeah, I have done SNMP implementations before so my eyes are
already been burned. And yes, I hope we reach a situation where
debugging of the RPC layer is really not needed anymore (and frankly,
for exactly this reason I would even be happy to just use RFC 1831 as
the RPC layer, seriously.)

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder		International University Bremen
Phone: +49 421 200 3587		P.O. Box 750 561, 28725 Bremen, Germany
Fax:   +49 421 200 3103		<http://www.iu-bremen.de/>

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