mark nottingham

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WS-Who's on First?

Sunday, 23 January 2005

Web Services

There are MEPs in SOAP and MEPs in WSDL; both describe patterns of messages, but at potentially different layers.

Meanwhile, SOAP has bindings and WSDL has bindings, and WS-Addressing has not one but two bindings too. But, a SOAP binding binds an underlying transport, a WSDL binding binds an abstract interface, and an Addressing binding binds abstract properties.

That’s different from Infoset properties, by the way, and not the properties in SOAP, which aren’t exactly the same as the properties in WSDL. Likewise, there are SOAP features and WSDL features, both doing similar-but-not-identical things.

Is it bad abstraction, or just a lack of imagination? Whatever the cause, please: stop… stop… hurting Web services. And my head.


One Comment

Bill de hOra said:

I was listening to this speech by Barry Swartz the other day:

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail252.html

He has a nice comment near the end on how having less options can be a good thing. It sure seems like we need more constraints and less choices in WS space. Aside from the overlapping terminology, choice in specifications strikes me as a bad thing. I wonder how many million ways there are to combine 50 WS specs to produce an architecture?

Monday, January 24 2005 at 3:30 AM

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