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[REBOL] Re: [Web-Services]

From: bry:itnisk at: 19-Jun-2004 9:31

the question is what kind of web services, rebol is well situated for building rest-based webservices, http://www.xfront.com/REST-Web-Services.html and not so well situated for building soap-based, if one realizes that what most developers of soap-services want is higher level tools that allow one to come to grips with the horrors of xml schema http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema#dev, wsdl http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl, the WS-I stack http://www.ws-i.org/ and so forth ad-infinitum. Having spent a couple years with SOAP, starting from its inception, to the first releases of the Microsoft Soap kit, and tools such as pocketsoap (still pretty much the only one I would trust), and going on to its acceptance as a W3 recommendation I can say that I really think this will end up being one of the industry's many failed technologies that currently is very hot, if someone wants to chase hotness, it is the thing everyone is chasing right now and as a consequence everyone says that oh, a language needs to support web services or it is doomed to extinction, on the other hand if what one assumes is that a developer will read and or write wsdl, schemas in some tool suited for doing so, and then write the rebol code to accept soap etc. it might be reasonably useful given that SOAP, as per spec is no longer thought of as being http specific but is instead conceived of as being protocol agnostic, an astonishingly bad design decision that leads me to assume I must have designed it while on a coked-up drunken manic spree that I am too fragile to safely recall, it is this protocol agnosticism that leads to really dumb things like this: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-soap12-rep-20040428/ which is an implementation of HTTP OVER SOAP, instead of Soap over http, hah, or this usage of sending sms messages over SOAP: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-tipsms1.html but anyway, it might be that rebol is better suited to working with this bad aspect of soap than many other languages. note that I do believe that xml is a technology that has passed the hot phase and become established, not having tools that support the core xml specifications make Rebol a harder sell. Anyway, It is support for these specifications that needs to be achieved if one ever wanted to do stuff like supporting web services etc. Quoting Gregg Irwin <[greggirwin--mindspring--com]>: