WIMS> Re: Accuracy of SOAP examples

WIMS> Re: Accuracy of SOAP examples

McDonald, Ira imcdonald at sharplabs.com
Thu Nov 10 11:50:00 EST 2005


Hi Jerry,

[[Background for all readers - the WSDL/2.0 _working_drafts_
have just passed through a second W3C 'last call'.  And the
W3C WSD WG has yet to agree to a new timeline for addressing
the W3C last call comments and publishing new working drafts
for potential advancement to W3C CR (Candidate Recommendation)
status.  After the W3C CRs are adopted, proof of implementation
MUST be verified before they can advance to W3C PR (Proposed
Recommendation) and subsequently to W3C REC (Recommendation -
the equivalent of an IETF Standard).  There are NO WSDL/2.0
toolkits in existence yet!]]


I agree that SOAP examples should be rigorous.  The difficulty
I see with generating and reviewing these examples is that even
the WSDL/2.0 Part 2 Adjuncts spec has extensions in there for
forcing particular serialization and headers in the resulting
SOAP/1.2 (or SOAP/1.1) messages and in the UNDERLYING HTTP/1.1
messages and headers.

That is, merely writing accurate WSDL/2.0 for WIMS will NOT
guarantee interoperable SOAP/HTTP messages.

Bill queried whether we could/should just write accurate
SOAP/1.2 Operation Request and Response examples and avoid
the WSDL/2.0 work for now.  I suggested that I think it will
be very hard to write a SOAP/1.2 example that can be certain 
to be generated by ANY future WSDL/2.0 definition.

Note that the XML 'direct' bindings in Appendix A of WIMS
are straight MIME-based encodings of the actual WIMS XML
messages (defined in our WIMS Message schema) and are NOT
dependent on WSDL definitions for interoperability (but of
course, they're not SOAP-based either).  

Note further that most of the WSDL/2.0 examples I've been able 
to find so far do NOT use SOAP - they use the separate direct 
binding of WSDL/2.0 to HTTP/1.1 and they associate WSDL/2.0 
Interface Faults with HTTP faults (not SOAP faults).  These
examples reflect the real world fact that existing Web servers
are serving HTML/XML directly over HTTP and NOT using SOAP
(because Browsers don't understand SOAP encodings).


I hope to have WSDL/2.0 and SOAP/1.2 (over HTTP/1.1) examples
for review in a few weeks.  But it will NOT be possible to
do machine validation of these examples, so they may not add
the needed clarity to the WIMS over SOAP bindings.

Cheers,
- Ira


Ira McDonald (Musician / Software Architect)
Blue Roof Music / High North Inc
PO Box 221  Grand Marais, MI  49839
phone: +1-906-494-2434
email: imcdonald at sharplabs.com 
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-wims at pwg.org [mailto:owner-wims at pwg.org]On Behalf Of
thrasher at lexmark.com
Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2005 4:06 PM
To: wims at pwg.org
Subject: WIMS> Re: Accuracy of SOAP examples



Regarding the question in the minutes about the accuracy of the SOAP
examples in the WIMS 
specification. 

I would think that the point of the WIMS protocol specification is to
provide enough 
information for independent non-WIMS WG members to pick up the document and 
create a WIMS Manager or a WIMS Agent that would be able to generate/consume

SOAP messages to/from a WIMS Manager/Agent from another independent non-WG 
member. Hence, we should provide an unambiguous definition of how the WIMS
Operations, 
Actions, and Responses should be generated in SOAP 1.2. 

Short of that, we have created an abstract document that nobody could really

implement. 

JT 

--- Forwarded by Jerry Thrasher/Lex/Lexmark on 11/09/2005 03:49 PM ----- 
Harry Lewis <harryl at us.ibm.com> 
Sent by: owner-wims at pwg.org 
11/09/2005 03:31 PM 
        
        To:        wims at pwg.org 
        cc:         
        Subject:        WIMS> WIMS Nov 9 minutes




ftp://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/wims/minutes/wims_051109.pdf 
Next meeting Wed, Nov 16                2 
Noon Eastern (NYC) 
Toll Free:     1-866-365-4406 
International: 00+1+303-248-9655 
Passcode:      2635888# 
---------------------------------------------- 
Harry Lewis 
IBM STSM
Chairman - IEEE-ISTO Printer Working Group
http://www.pwg.org
IBM Printing Systems 
http://www.ibm.com/printers
303-924-5337
---------------------------------------------- 



More information about the Wims mailing list