Technology Choices: XML-RPC vs SOAP

[Rick Stevens]

In any case we need to layout in the development roadmap the SOAP and 
pyGlobus plan with dates.

At 08:05 AM 9/18/2002 -0500, Robert Olson wrote:

>>Python 2.x (I think it was 2.0 then, it's probably true that we've moved
>>to 2.2)
>
>Yup.
>
>>The conclusion being, we should probably be targeting SOAP as our first
>>web services interface, for interop, tools availability, and to remain
>>true to our claim that "we adhere to standards" (not like the big bad
>>you know who).  I know this is a shift, but I know way back when, I was
>>also advocating building our system independent of the network interface
>>so we could easily adapt network interfaces (I know there's some of this
>>in Bob's venues stuff now), which was based on the pain of ripping corba
>>out of voyager. If we've done that, it shouldn't be too painful to
>>gracefully transition to SOAP from XML-RPC, as our primary target.
>
>I agree that we should target SOAP. However, Not Yet. It took a fair bit 
>of engineering work to make the underlying services library happy in its 
>handling of XMLRPC and integration with Globus. If we put off any more 
>prototyping effort now until we have a SOAP-based infrastructure we won't 
>have anything to show at SC.
>
>The other development that makes me want to wait is the work that Keith 
>Jackson (pyGlobus guy, from LBL) is planning to do with respect to a 
>native Python binding of the OGSA specificiation. If that work happens 
>(I've pinged him about its status) we could conceivably leverage all its 
>engineering work and be OGSA-compliant.
>
>My approach in prototyping is to use good engineering practices and 
>identify and isolate the network interface parts of the services. Right 
>now, they're exposed via the XMLRPC service interface (via the service 
>interface definition file). Later, they could be exposed via an OGSA interface.
>
>--bob