Re: IETF draft on appropriate uses of HTTP

["Anne Thomas Manes" <annethomas@earthlink.net>]

> David E. Cleary agreed with David Boreham,
>
> >> > I want to make it very clear that Sun has NOT said that we will
support
> >> > SOAP. We have said that if it gets endorsed by ebXML, IETF, W3C, or
> some
> >> > other established consensus body, then we will support SOAP.
> >>
> >> Double speak worthy of Microsoft !
> >>
> >> Decoded, this means that Sun does not want to support SOAP, correct ?
> >
> >Imagine if everybody said that they wouldn't support Java until it was
> >endoresed by ISO, ECMA, ....
>


Please excuse my double speak. The press has a tendency to overstate things,
and I didn't want your decisions swayed by an inaccurate impression. The
headlines indicated that we were endorsing SOAP, and that is an exaggeration
of our position. We didn't particularly care for SOAP 1.0. It was quite
proprietary and not particularly extensible. But SOAP 1.1 is much improved.
We still have some significant concerns regarding SOAP (in particular, lack
of transactions and security, although these services could be specified
later). But at least we think we can reasonably work with it now. If the
SOAP Internet Draft / Note gets picked up by IETF or W3C, we'll get engaged
in the open standards process. We're not rushing out to provide a SOAP
implementation next week, but we may add support for SOAP to some of our
integration products.

More to the point, Sun supports ebXML. SOAP is a simple, lightweight,
XML-based communications system. We don't believe that it addresses the
complex infrastructure requirements of B2B and international trade. We are
working with ebXML to ensure that a standard B2B infrastructure gets defined
that can support these requirements.

Is that more clear?

Anne Thomas Manes
Director Business Strategy
Sun Microsystems
anne.manes@sun.com
617-497-1748