Technology Choices: XML-RPC vs SOAP

[Rick Stevens]

I'm strongly in favor of going to a standards based implementation
as long as it make technical sense.  My guess is SOAP is where
we should be.

At 08:24 AM 9/13/2002 -0500, Ivan R. Judson wrote:

>Terry was right this list can be used for all sorts of good things. I
>think one discussion that might help drive our designs faster is on
>basic technology.
>
>Way back when we discussed what tools to build 2.0 with, we decided on a
>list like:
>
>Python 2.x (I think it was 2.0 then, it's probably true that we've moved
>to 2.2)
>wxWindows
>Globus Toolkit 2.0
>XML-RPC
>
>I was a big advocate for XML-RPC when we had this discussion but I've
>changed my mind about what the web services technology we should use is.
>Remember at the time there were no standards for any of the SOAP, WSDL,
>etc tools. Now WSDL and SOAP have been picked up by W3C to create
>standards for them. They might fail, but since they have taken up the
>effort it's worth thinking about.
>
>I've laid out a set of trade-offs for XML-RPC vs SOAP:
>
>XML-RPC                                         SOAP
>-------                                         ----
>Community based "standard"                      W3C standard
>Simple to use                                   Not as simple
>Limited Data Model                              Arbitrarily Complex Data
>Model
>Tools available                                 Tools Available
>Supported in Python                             Supported in Python
>Not supported by MS                             Supported by all MS
>products and tools
>Not the target for Globus/OGSA          The target for Globus/OGSA
>
>I'm sure there are other factors to consider, but they are both
>available on all our platforms, in all our tools. Further, SOAP actually
>allows us (because of the last two oints) to target convergence with MS
>and Globus in development efforts if we choose to, XML-RPC doesn't.
>
>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.
>
>Thoughts?
>
>--Ivan
>
>..........
>Ivan R. Judson .~. http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~judson
>Futures Laboratory .~.  630 252 0920
>Argonne National Laboratory .~. 630 252 6424 Fax
>