distributed computing implementations

[Cameron Laird]

In article <a626bbd7.0304031149.7abe84c0 at posting.google.com>,
robin <escalation746 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>claird at lairds.com (Cameron Laird) wrote:
>
>> SOAP and such are just concessions to commercial misunder-
>> standings about what business needs.
>
>I would like to know more about what you mean by this.
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I'll do this in an abbreviated form.

SOAP's s'posed to be the "Simple Object Access Protocol".
It's defining document begins, "SOAP is a lightweight
protocol ..." 

It's a bad sign that it's fiction from the start.  SOAP
isn't lightweight or simple, and it doesn't particularly
access objects.

SOAP is an RPC implementation.  I'm fine with RPC, and I
like SOAP--'hope I get more jobs to do it during the next
year.  However, I think commercial experience has demon-
strated adequately that RPC isn't safe in the hands of
the programming fraternity at large.  It's something medi-
ocre programmers do wrong.

Businesses *think* they want their development crews to
standardize on an RPC, and XML is a good thing, isn't it?,
but they're wrong.  RPC across organizational boundaries
turns out to be somewhere between difficult and a disaster.

Businesses that are happy with SOAP are actually using it
as a messaging service for asynchronous transmission of
XMLified documents with business content.

I repeat:  for a mixture of correct and incorrect reasons,
XML, RPC, and so on are believed to be good things for
business.  People conclude that SOAP must be a super-
technology, solving whole layers of issues at once.  It's
not.  It's OK, and, with enough support from Microsoft,
IBM, Oracle, and a few others, it certainly can dominate.
In truth, though, it answers the wrong question.

Python's own Paul Prescod has plenty to say about SOAP's
technical flaws.  Check out <URL: http://
mail.python.org/pipermail/xml-sig/2002-February/007183.html >
and other references available through <URL: http://prescod.com >.
-- 

Cameron Laird <Cameron at Lairds.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://phaseit.net/claird/home.html