FW: [SOAP] Notes from Chicago BOF meeting

["Dick Brooks" <dick@8760.com>]

More information from the SOAP front.

Question for the header group: Should SOAP be included as a candidate for
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Dick Brooks
http://www.8760.com/


-----Original Message-----
From: SOAP [mailto:SOAP@DISCUSS.DEVELOP.COM]On Behalf Of Bob Salita
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2000 11:22 AM
To: SOAP@DISCUSS.DEVELOP.COM
Subject: [SOAP] Notes from Chicago BOF meeting


Here's some notes from yesterday's Chicago SOAP BOF meeting. They
should be of general interest.

The meeting was called because Kent Sharkey, Technical Evangelist at
Microsoft, asked to make a presentation about SOAP. We hoped to
receive some software bits although this was not the case.

Prior to his arrival, we polled our group's opinions. 92% felt the
proposed breakup of Microsoft into two parts (OS vs. Office) was a
really bad idea. 92% felt Microsoft's appeal would prevail thus
gutting Judge Jackson's decision.

The mix of favored programming languages changed. In our previous
meeting, interests were very fragmented. This meeting 90% were
both C++ and VB oriented, 50% used some Java, 10% were other.

Kent demonstrated Web Services which contained Microsoft's SOAP and
ROAP implementation. I found the following info significant.

* Most importantly, Kent emphasized that Microsoft's SOAP activities,
such as Web Services, are a work in progress. Much will change,
many improvements are expected. Kent set our level of expectation by
stating that Web Services will be a reference implementation, not
an idealized implementation. There is great need and opportunity
for additional implementations of SOAP. Including implementations
that target COM, languages, hardware vendors, security, performance.
Thus I hope to see additional implementations from DevelopMentor,
IBM (hopefully open source), third party TCP/IP control vendors,
and custom implementations. Entreprenuers take note.

* Kent felt that Web Services will be delayed another month.
In my mind I pessimistically expect no final bits until October.

* Web Services will not initially contain an SSL implementation.

* Performance may be an issue. Expect to solve performance issues
by clusterering.

* The SOAP 1.1 spec documents HTTP as a carrier. Expect future SOAP
specs to include SMTP, perhaps ftp and MSMQ also.

* Future SOAP specs aren't likely to break 1.1 implementations.

* The ROAP implementation, which is the mechanism for VB programs
to access SOAP servers, is relatively simple but by no means
elegant.

* A SOAP IDL spec and implementation seems to be months away.

* Microsoft would like to add a web discovery mechanism that
interrogates SOAP servers for information, such as services provided.
Shades of Corba Trader services?

* Web Services software development is being done by the MSDN group.
Some of the Duwamish people are on the project.

* IBM was rumored to have more SOAP developers than Microsoft.

* SOAP's momentum is continuing.

Bob.
_____________________________________________________________________
Bob Salita         Bob_Salita@SoftworksLtd.com     Software Developer
Softworks Limited                             http://SoftworksLtd.com
_____________________________________________________________________
 Author of Softworks VBVM, a portable Visual Basic Virtual Machine.
     Hold the Java. Run VB 5/6 programs on any computer system.

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