So SOAP feels more like the doorknob to the gates of hell. In itself, a doorknob is hardly evil. But once you turn... :)
The point of the comment is that SOAP in and of itself is really just an extensibility/header model over XML. The hell that David is referring to is of course what people (including me) have done to exploit that model.
Even though I've
had some pretty visceral reactions to what people have done with XML both inside and outside of MS, I never thought of XML itself as being Satan's doormat.
On the topic of extensibility mechanisms and the hell they inherently allow, it's fun to imagine the world that might have been had Paul Leach and Henrik Frystyk Nielsen been successful in getting
HTTP Extension Framework adopted by both the IETF community and the IBM/Microsoft coalition.
For those that don't know, HTTP EF was a precursor to the first published SOAP specs. Henrik and Co. wanted to put some discipline over the extensibility model of HTTP and you can see a lot of the current SOAP header design in that spec.
Now, had Henrik and Paul been successful in getting the world (or at least MS and IBM) to swallow the HTTP EF pill, we might see GET requests that look something like this:
M-GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: some.host
Opt: "http://www.xmlsoap.org/ws/reliablemessage"; ns=14
Man: "http://www.xmlsoap.org/ws/security"; ns=15
Man: "http://www.xmlsoap.org/ws/secconv"; ns=16
Man: "http://www.xmlsoap.org/ws/trust"; ns=17
Opt: "http://www.xmlsoap.org/ws/timestamp"; ns=18
14-SequenceId="uuid:12341234-1234-1234-2134-123412341234"
15-Token: "abc9ea…"
15-Signature: "hash=eaffab36ca…, referencedParts=...,"
16-Token: "aa84…"
18-Expires: "2006-12-01T08:00:00Z"
Had we arrived here instead, would we now be referring to HTTP as the
Slip-n-slide to Hades?
Posted
Mar 22 2006, 02:29 AM
by
don-box