On Thu, 2006-08-03 at 08:50 -0400, Hadrian Zbarcea wrote:
> 
> > So in short, I'm totally against losing the XML and SOAP centric
> nature of Synapse (or Axis2).
> I want to be clear on something. I am totally against losing the XML
> nature, I am totally *for* loosing the SOAP nature, for many reasons. 

Sorry, I'm *totally* against that too :). Been there, done that many
times and am 200% convinced we have the right design point.

>  One ugly thing is the soap versioning that we already have to deal
> with in synapse (but there are many others). 

This ugliness can easily be cleaned up.

>  This should be totally hidden by the ws stack.  This is assuming you
> have one. 

I assume you know about WSIF .. Paul and I created that puppy and we
know its limitations. There's a limit to what you can hide .. the leaky
abstraction principle is indeed true!
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html

> One could use synapse hosted in an app, orchestrating between screens
> for instance (silly example) the xml messages would come from the app
> itself (which instantiates the MC, etc etc) and not from a WS stack.

We have a way to handle XML data already; we treat it as if it came in a
SOAP Infoset. That's the way the Axis2 arch works for supporting REST
and SOAP with a consistent programming model.

> I hope this won't come down to the ages old debate "is WS about SOAP
> or not necessarily?".  As WS-A at least suggests it isn't and
> personally I am on that side of the fence.

I'm the one who originally created the WSDL (and its precursor) religion
about "WS is not about SOAP". I've since converted; WS *is* about SOAP.
Obviously that is irrelevant for you (I understand that) but just wanted
to make the point that I've been there and gotten past it.

I know you don't believe me .. but try figuring out how to map
WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Security etc. to something other than SOAP and
you'll understand why that world failed. I know IONA has a different
perspective and I respect (and welcome) that, but Axis2 and Synapse were
both designed from day one with the perspective that the world is indeed
all about SOAP. I'm certainly not about to change that.

(Please do read the archives to see some of the many months of
discussions that went into these decisions on both axis-dev and
synapse-dev.)

>   The very fact that we are talking about SOAP to CORBA is proof. 

Um no. Its proof that folks have legacy endpoints in CORBA that they
want to expose thru SOAP .. that's it. 

>  Are you suggesting one should wrap the corba message into a SOAP
> envelope just for the sake of processing it?  Ok, I won't start again
> with the SOAP version.  Imho, mapping corba to xml is a great thing
> and is sufficient.  

Then take that XML and leave it inside the SOAP envelope. Yes that is
what I'm suggesting.

> And btw, if there are any doubts, it also works, I did this for the
> past 3 years and our customers used this in production for a while.  I
> won't say more to not sound like an ad.

I've done this for a long time too .. I had a big part in creating WSDL,
WSIF and IBM's Web Services Gateway, which all do this (and pretty much
were the first to do these). However, I'm fully aware of the limitations
and am convinced those limitations are intrinsic and crippling.

In any case, there are a couple of Apache projects which do exactly what
you're suggesting: JBI and SCA. They both start with a normalized
message model and work around with that. Celtixfire, which you of course
know about, is also doing a similar thing AIUI (we haven't seen any code
yet so not sure of course) .. trying to do better than JBI and SCA. My
feeling: good luck and have fun. That's not what Axis2 and Synapse are
about.

Sanjiva.



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