SOAP anyone?

[Fairlight]

Confusious (Ron Kracht) say:
> that we developed and which will be part of a planned XML related
> enhancement package for filePro.

And you're including a universal XML import wizard in that, right?

> The application has allowed one filePro application to be certified as
> SOAP-capable so we know that it works for it's so far limited purpose. 

What -exactly- does that mean?  Certified by whom?  For what purpose?

No disrespect intended here, but SOAP's spec defines a (horrible, lousy,
barely strictly adhered to by a good percentage of developers from what
I've both heard and directly seen) communications protocol construction
standard in XML at the application level.  It doesn't even mandate any
particular transport--just a number of agreed upon conditions for the
formatting of the envelope and body, fault tolerance, and some things like
forwarding that are still not nailed to the floor.

The upshoot of the spec's looseness is that any application that can be
made to parse and output strings and adhere to the loosest form of the
specification can be considered "SOAP capable" in the broadest sense.

So how, exactly, are you defining "SOAP-capable" in your scenario? 

FWIW...SOAP over HTTP really doesn't do anything for you that couldn't be
done far, far more easily in CGI 1.1 plus adding in something like RawQuery
or cURL (any B2B-class HTTP client) to handle making requests--years before
SOAP existed.  I have yet to see anything cited that couldn't have been
done without SOAP as far back as 1994, given proper coding.  In fact, it's
far, -far- more convoluted than was ever necessary.  If I didn't know
better, I'd say the spec was government sponsored, it's that horrid and
convoluted.

It's one of those things "everyone uses" but nobody really knows why
they're using it, other than it's "official" and the people they're working
with use it, so they have to.  Not many have ever given a solid rationale
that justifies the amount of contortions involved.  "It's built into
[MS_SOLUTION|JAVA]," is -not- a valid rationale.  Great, they use it
because their black box tells them that's the way to go, then expect the
world to follow suit.  Bright decision-making at work.

It should really be called OAP.  There's nothing "simple" at work there.

mark->
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