Steve comments on Mark Baker's
current issue with WS-Addressing. There are several things which are interesting about this situation. The first interesting point to me, is Mark's statement from his
original post to the WS-Addressing WG;
"Here, "foobar@fabrikam123.example" is required to go in the
SOAP header, rather than in the "RCPT TO" command of the SMTP
protocol (as an example of one email delivery protocol)."
The thing that strikes me as odd with this statement is the phrase 'rather than'. The WS-Addressing spec doesn't say that you *can't* put the content of wsa:Address into 'the "RCPT TO" command on the SMTP protocol'. It just says you MUST put it into the wsa:To SOAP header. I wonder why Mark thought the two were mutually exclusive…
Of course, if the wsa:Address in an Endpoint Reference turns out to be urn:foo:bar, then it's not going to be much good to the SMTP protocol, or any other transport protocol for that matter.
Which brings me to my second point; endpoints may well be available over several protocols; HTTP, SMTP, TCP, UDP. I for one, do not want to be *forced* to coin 4 separate Endpoint References, one for each protocol. Equally, I don't want to be prohibited from coining 4 such Endpoint References if I so desire. In the one Endpoint Reference, multiple protocols case, it's fairly obvious ( to me at least ) that the value of the wsa:Address ( and corresponding wsa:To ) cannot be used as address information for all of the underlying transports ( although it might, by happy accident, work for one of them ).
Steve alludes to the above in his discussion of a putative [Transport Address] property of an Endpoint Reference. I suspect that many people's stacks work pretty much the way he describes.
The third interesting point in completely non-technical, but rather a socio-political one. Mark raised his issue with the WS-Addressing WG who considered his request, thought about at least some of the things mentioned above and in Steve's post and declined to take up his issue. Not being willing (able?) to take 'No' for an answer, Mark then raised his issue with a higher authority, the TAG, hoping, I guess, that they will make the WS-Addressing WG see the error of its ways…
All I can say in conclusion is that I see that fact that the wsa:To does not necessarily match the transport address that a message arrives on as a feature and not a bug…
Posted
Jan 25 2005, 02:20 AM
by
martin-gudgin