Three cheers for GET services

[Roy Williams]

Three cheers for GET services

(This subject line is just to stir up the SOAP fundamentalists). As I start
moving to the world of SOAP, I want to know how to do all the nifty things I
used to be able to do with GET.

(1) Please find below an email that I sent to myself yesterday. It is a pointer
to a GET-based web service, and that is why it is easy to send the email. Just
click on it in your email spool. It is a virtual finding chart, bringing not
just a picture, but a browser of many layers and other drilldown features. It is
nifty to send a complete "service request" to a colleague, and all they need to
do is to click on it.

But when we are running things on SOAP services, how can we do the same thing?
Suppose I write to my colleague saying "use the http://blah service with x=2 and
y=3", how long would it take them to figure out how to see the result?

(2) On the same topic is the question of partial arguments to SOAP services. For
example, under the GET system, I can *derive* a service from another. If service
http://blah.edu/siap? returns images of all bandpasses, then the new service
http://blah.edu/siap?BANDPASS=z can be derived (by simple concatenation!) that
returns only z-images.

Or, for example, a client could go to a login screen at http://blah.edu/login
and get in return email a URL containing his session number, such as
http://blah.edu/login?s=6ac3768ce8ff8. Clicking on this completes the login
process.

(3) There are a lot of nice read/parse qualities about GET requests. It would be
nice to have both GET and SOAP at the same time. To somehow send keyword-value
by the GET channel, but the complex objects and binary through the SOAP channel.

People know and trust the GET method. Crossing the bridge to SOAP should be
possible by gradual steps.

Roy

--------
California Institute of Technology
roy at caltech.edu
626 395 3670

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Roy Williams" <roy at cacr.caltech.edu>
To: "Roy Williams" <roy at cacr.caltech.edu>
Sent: Saturday, June 05, 2004 9:10 PM
Subject: PQ/sdss stack in VS

Finding chart PQ-2004-05-18

>
http://virtualsky.org/servlet/Page?F=1&RA=230&DE=-.20000&Exp=Go+Here&T=4&P=11&S=11&X=1687&Y=2043&W=4&Z=-1&M=1