Jim Murphy wrote:
IMHO, Web Service Message design has been an afterthought of the spec working groups that comprise your typical WS stack. You need to know a lot of grunge to design an easy to consume service:
1. XSD - what to use and what to avoid is the hard part especially when modeling non trivial data. What will axis do with a .NET DataSet, or collections or...
2. WSDL - WSDL 1.1 is chaos. Hopefully WSDL 2.0 will improve that but it looks m ore complex not less to me though several problem have been addressed. There is the question of migration from WSDL 1.1 to WSDL 2.0 as well. Not exactly straight forward.
3. Various language bindings. What will you interface be like to code against in the foo language?
Dennis Sosnoski wrote:
doc/lit means you don't need to care about 1 or 3 - you specify the XML format and let the clients worry about how they want to handle it. 2 is a separate issue...
Really? I can see how it would be liberating to think this way but I can break away from wanting nice clean language binding (Java, C#, C++) for my doc/lit services.
ASP.NET's ASMX seems to have done and it for many but not all cases. Perhaps this is just too elusive to hope for and thunking to XML is the way forward? The Various XML programming APIs have improved since DOM/SAX with pull parsers, JDOM and what have you so maybe folks wont feel the need to bind XML types to Java types... Are we there yet?
Jim Murphy Mindreef, Inc.
