Web service standards - what comes first, the doc or the object?

[Martin Hill]

Well... you always have a document on the wire.  The thing is do you start from 
your objects and auto-generate the document (often invisibly), or do you start 
from the documents and have special marshallers/serialisers to convert from doc 
to your objects?

The VO approach (and other broad-based services) is to start with the document. 
This is the most inconvenient from the coders point of view, as you can't just 
throw your objects to the web interface and have them get magically serialised 
and sent (or v.v.).  However it's the only way that works between 
languages/webservers, as each has it's own way of doing the 'magically 
serialised' bit.  The only way we can get our services is to agree the documents 
being transferred, and then work out our own ways to get those docs in and out 
of our favourite languages.

However I think there are now VOTable marshallers for .NET (Wil?) and java 
(SAVOT) so you can use those to help.

Cheers,

Martin

Hans-Martin Adorf wrote:
> Well, having only an XML document would be a pity, and I would again be 
> somewhat farther away from the desired solution.
> 
> -hma
> 
> Martin Hill wrote:
> 
>>
>> Wil O'Mullane wrote:
>>
>>> The SkyNode spec and WSDL already wraps up VOTABLE for SOAP
>>> No you do not return a string you return a VOTable object - we have
>>> several SOAP servies which already do this - our CONE and SIAP
>>> services are webservices which return VOTable 
>>
>>
>> Being pedantic just to avoid confusion; you return a VOTable 
>> *document* that conforms to the VOTable schema, rather than a 
>> generically serialised VOTable object.
>>
>> I think. :-)
>>
> 
> -- 
> Dr. Hans-Martin Adorf • Max-Planck-Institut f. extraterrestrische Physik 
> • Giessenbachstr. 1 • D-85741 Garching b. München • Germany
> Phone: +49-89-30000-3352 • Fax: +49-89-30000-3404 • E-Mail: 
> adorf at mpe.mpg.de • WWW: http://www.g-vo.org

-- 
Martin Hill
www.mchill.net
+44 7901 55 24 66