On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 11:17:07PM -0700, Mark Nottingham wrote: > TimBL, with his director's cap on, made a presentation [1] at the AC > meeting in Hong Kong that belies this (there was a nice RDF-generated > SVG illustration of this that I can't seem to find, at the moment).
Yes, I've seen that before. I can only assume that by "XML Protocol Enhanced", TimBL was referring to the same use of SOAP as I've been advocating. His description of Web services in the text you pointed to would *seem* to back me up on this; "A further need was "reliable messaging". TCP/IP, of course, provides reliability in that an agent can be absolutely sure that its peer has received a given item of information when it has received a response. HTTP is reliable in that sense. However, reliability here is in another sense. No one keeps HTTP requests and responses (or old IP packets) for a long time, to prove that a message was sent -- there is no way of demonstrating that they really were sent anyway. Business applications, however, will have to keep the messages for many years, beyond the life of the hardware or software which originally handled them. This means that the format of such messages must be as clean as possible, and largely independent of as much transient technology as possible. Reliable messaging involves building this on top of XML." This is more like my view of reliability in the context of Web architecture, than is provided for by technologies such as HTTPR and on the discussions we've had in the Web Services Architecture WG. Though I have some additional ideas. > The Web is bigger than HTTP. Yes, but no bigger than HTTP's application semantics. MB -- Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc. Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.markbaker.ca http://www.planetfred.com
