Sam says:


If you ever are in a position where you can control both ends of the wire...

There are much better protocols than SOAP

• Compactness
  
• Fidelity
  

I disagree. While compactness is a nice thing to have, I can't think of system I could build (outside of network gaming engines) that requires anything SOAP doesn't offer. Plus, if the gods on high who run XML can ever deliver unto us a binary XML, then you could imagine no re-engineering to take advantage of the newly compact form. As for fidelity: I'm against fidelity.

I believe that systems, regardless of how much of it you own, will be more robust using SOAP as opposed to other protocols. The key is two things: 1) versioning via namespaces, and 2) SOAP headers. Both of these allow us to build composable systems that can evolve. I also believe that OOP will be supplanted as the dominant programming model over the next 5-10 years as the XML and Web services model takes hold. I'm already building apps where I send hand-crafted SOAP messages within the application from one piece of code to another. Remember: the OS itself works off a message pump.

Simon asks an interesting question about wsdl.exe /server. This was indeed pretty broken in .NET Fx 1.0 -- inheritence didn't pick up the attributes. I thought we fixed that for .NET Fx 1.1, but I've been working on the WSE pretty heavily, so am unsure. What I've done with this instead is taken the generated code (which gets the attributes right) and changed the class itself from an abstract one to a real class with implementation -- not the best experience in the world. Actually, though, I've mostly just created the services by hand.

I realize now my book should have warned that there were problems with this switch. I tried to focus on more prescriptive guidance, and I think omitting that was a mistake (albeit an unconcious one). For the most part, I tried to explain instead how to do what wsdl.exe /server does, so that you could do it by hand.

I've converted one of my three blogs to BlogY (another name for BlogX 1.1). This is the project that Don mentioned last week. If all goes well, I'll convert this blog to it within the next few weeks and then you all can have an RSS feed to subscribe to.

Interesting questions about WS-Addressing. Here's my take:

WS-Addressing can enable callback. However, <ReplyTo> isn't required. In my world, <From> is typically the node who sent the message. When you decide to reply ("callback") to the message, you should send it to the location specified in the <From> unless there is a <ReplyTo>, in which case the <From> is essentially overridden. If you need send a SOAP fault in response to the message, you can send it to the <From>, unless there's a <ReplyTo>, but if there's a <FaultTo> you should send it there instead.

This is insane and scary. Mike worked on the same Intel campus I did. There's no proof he's done anything. He gave a few thousand dollars to charity, many years ago. He's a US citizen who's been taken from his family with no due process. He's not the only one, either. I'm begining to be reminded of this:

"In Germany they came first for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me--and by that time no one was left to speak up." -- Martin Niemöller

And I'm not the only one.

BlogX now in Workspaces

I've enlisted.