Web service standards question

[Alasdair Allan]

> VOTable is an XML format, and thus very appropriate for REST services, 
> where the query is submitted via a simple HTTP GET or POST, and the 
> result is commonly returned in XML. However, these days people, when 
> talking about Web services, usually mean SOAP-based Web services, which 
> I believe is what you are talking about, too. (Please correct me, if I'm 
> wrong.) As the name states, SOAP is a protocol allowing the transfer of 
> objects. I believe, we should not encode tabular data in a VOTable XML 
> format, which is in some sense a serialization of some internal data 
> object, and then let the server-side SOAP mechanism wrap it once more 
> with XML. Not only is this totally inefficient (factors of 10 or more 
> can easily be encountered), but we also do not take advantage of the 
> abilities of the SOAP mechanism.

Erm, no. It depends very critically whether you're talking about SOAP RPC 
services, or wrapped, or document liternal services. XML documents are
perfectly appropriate things to return from a SOAP service.

> What I would like to see is an internal tabular data object that is 
> populated on the server side, then transparently serialized and 
> transmitted via SOAP, and finally reconstructed on the client side. 

That would be highly language specific, document literal, or wrapped 
document where a language neutral XML document is transmitted is a much 
better idea IMHO. Not everybody is using Java...

Al.
-- 
Dr. A. Allan, School of Physics, University of Exeter