Web service standards question

[Alasdair Allan]

> as the name indicates, the SOAP protocol allows the transfer of objects. 

Indeed! I think the important word in that sentense is "allows"...

> This has nothing to do with Java. The SOAP protocol is programming 
> language neutral, and I can transmit an object from C# to Java, or from 
> Java to Perl. (We have done the latter.) So I believe your comment that 
> transmitting an object would "be highly language specific" misses the point.

In theory, yes. In practice interoperability between the toolsets is 
somewhat less than perfect. For internal interfaces RPC is defiantely the 
way to go, for publically available services? I would probably go with 
wrapped document (mainly because I'm too lazy to code a proper document 
literal service).
 
> Why would you prefer an XML string representation that you have to parse 
> in order to construct an object which you could get immediately? And why 
> would you want to use SOAP at all, if you don't want objects? Where is 
> the benefit compared to a much simpler REST service?

Well, a whole bunch of stuff...

Simplistically using SOAP gets you things like WS-RF, WS-I and WS-Security 
and interoperability with web/grid services. There are lots of other 
advantages to SOAP over REST that has nothing to do with RPC encoding.

While SOAP was originally targeted as RPC, there are alot of document
literal (and wrapped document) services now, the original SOAP encoding of
the message isn't really heavily used. Parsing an XML document isn't
exactly a major overhead...

Guy? Didn't the GWS-WG recommend we stuck to wrapped document last year at
Strasbourg? I can't remember exactly how the discussion went...

> What is a "liternal service", please?

Sorry, typing error, I meant "literal service"...

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