ietf-openproxy
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Comparison of ICAP and SOAP

2001-06-27 18:09:30


Roy, I have no intention of getting into a war re: SOAP, 'my
standardization body is better/bigger than your
psuedo-standardization body' or anything else with you. But I
distinctly hear axes grinding here...


On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 04:27:13PM -0700, Roy T. Fielding wrote:

Excuse me, Lee, but I am getting tired of the marketing bull
associated with SOAP.

So don't listen. Or do you characterize people bringing up SOAP as a
possible solution for OPES as 'marketing bull'? I know it's Not
Invented Here, but not everyting good in the world was brought to us
by the kind benevolence of the IETF.


The fact of the matter is that SOAP was defined by a far smaller
group of people with no open industry involvement and then moved to
a pay-per-view pseudo-standards body for ratification.

IME, technology that is initially defined externally, and then
refined by the IETF process is most likely to succeed. Besides which,
SOAP was brought to the IETF, and deemed too scary-application-layer
to touch.

The W3C is indeed membership-based. So what? BTW, the W3C does not
characterize itself as being a standards organisation.


It is not and never has been implemented in real Web services, in
spite of the marketing splash of "Web Services". 

What exactly are 'real Web services'?


 This doesn't mean it is better or worse than iCAP, but it is
completely foolish to disparage iCAP for being developed outside
the normal IETF process when SOAP didn't even come close to that.

I've participated in both iCAP and SOAP development, and would
certainly not characterize iCAP as more openly developed than SOAP.

 
There is no reason why people can't implement an iCAP-like RPC
mechanism in the form of SOAP over BEEP (or whatever), but until
someone does it and actually deploys it for a real application, any
claims about its suitability for this purpose are just marketing
bull.

I resent your characterization of anything to do with SOAP as
'marketing bull'; this group is trying to explore what the best thing
to do is. Ruling out options based on prejudice doesn't seem very
open, now, does it?


Just to be clear, I don't like iCAP as a protocol (I have
implemented an earlier version) and I don't like SOAP as a protocol
(even though the only real implementation of SOAP is now an Apache
project)

Are you purposefully ignoring the 50+ other implementations? Or is
something only 'real' when it's associated with Apache?



-- 
Mark Nottingham