[XML-SIG] WSDL library ?

[Uche Ogbuji]

> On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 11:31:29PM -0700, Uche Ogbuji wrote:
> > > > I will be extremely disappointed if WSDL 1.1 is made SOAP only.
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Don't worry, I expect to lose that battle.
> > 
> > Good.
> > 
> > It looks as if you should have made it to SPAM10 for the Web services panel.  
> > You would have been the only one with any decent amount of good things to say 
> > about SOAP  ;-)
> > 
> > Pretty scary when I'd be more comfortable pointing people to a hack like 
> > XML-RPC than I would be pointing people to SOAP.
> 
>   Fits the 80%/20% rule perfectly. Less than 5 pages and easy to implement
> reliably. For the people in that 80% pool it's simply the best solution.
> The only problem is being able to cache calls without side-effects, but
> it's a scaling issue, and that minimal addition could probably be
> standardized on top the core (like HTTP/1.1 vs HTTP/1.0 initial goal).

But it still is hacky.  The biggest problems in my own experience are:

* ASCII only (UTF-7, anyone?)
* Very sketchy datatyping support for RPC, including no support for generic 
types.

Some people might consider part 2 outside the 80% point, but I disagree: I 
think that flexible data types are the key to complex problem solving using 
RPC.

Of course, that is bearing in mind that it's better to to avoid RPC entirely 
if one has complex problems to solve.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc.                         http://Fourthought.com 
4735 East Walnut St, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA
XML strategy, XML tools (http://4Suite.org), knowledge management