Re: Re: SOAP, XMLRPC and WSDL

I think the point Zeev was making is that in real life these days many decision makers are looking for the web services buzz word when choosing a technology. Telling them "PHP supports web services" can only be a good thing in the fight against MS and other giants. In many people's perception SOAP is part of "web services". We're not going to educate the whole software industry *even* if there are inaccuracies out there. And as far as I see it PHP is going to be in a battle with .NET and J2EE. Anyway, it's not worth getting into a long discussion about it I just wanted to explain that perception, as Zeev put it, everything or almost everything. Andi At 15:39 23/05/2002 -0700, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

At 00:08 24/05/2002, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

I really don't like the term Web Services. SOAP is an RPC mechanism and has nothing to do with the web despite what M$ would like to have you think.

I think that's kind of like saying HTML has nothing to do with the web, but anyway, perception is everything. If people look for web services, then IMHO, that's what they should find. Well, HTML is an intrical part of the Web and I don't see how that can be compared to SOAP at all. In order for SOAP to be part of the Web it needs to conform to the HTTP protocol and to the concepts that defines the Web. It doesn't do that at all today. It has taken the URL and other HTTP header control data and completely mangled it by pushing content and commands over it that do not match the semantics of the HTTP header control data. Just because you tunnel something over port 80 to avoid being blocked by firewalls doesn't suddenly mean you are now a web protocol. This argument is a current battle within the W3C where a lot of people would like to see SOAP kicked out of the organization. Nobody has ever threatened to kick the HTML working groups out of the W3C. -Rasmus -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php