[Zope-dev] SOAP support: request for comments

Brian Lloyd brian.lloyd@zope.com
Mon, 30 Jul 2001 10:34:57 -0400


> I think SOAP is a very important feature for "selling" Zope. As Toby
> Dickenson pointed out, the actual use cases are still a bit rare, but this
> might change a lot with the upcoming ".NET" products from Microsoft.

You are exactly on target here - there is a definite mindshare
wave happening around SOAP / WS. More importantly there are
absolutely actual use cases now and a clear enough picture of
what's coming to start taking some decisions.

The clarity part is very important, IMHO. It's taken a while to
get there, but I think it's actually a good thing that SOAP
support wasn't immediately woven in as soon as it was feasible.
I've been pretty deeply immersed in web services lately, and its
pretty clear (to me, though others may certainly argue the point)
that "web services" support for Zope should _not_ look like the
current xml-rpc support. I won't go into detail here - lets do
that in the fishbowl :)


> With regards to the implementation, it might be a good idea to
> try to do it
> the "components" way. Though, the new Zope components framework is still
> just a vision and proof of concept.

Certainly we want to make sure we do things the component way
when appropriate - but I don't think we'll know exactly what
that means until we have solid use cases.


> I've set up a Fishbowl proposal for a Zope SOAP implementation a couple of
> weeks ago. Feel free to take it over, as I mainly put it onto the
> dev.zope.org Wiki to make sure it doesn't get forgotten ...

I will volunteer to start a separate proposal to try to combine
the current SOAP proposals with my own biased agenda :) This is
something that will _really_ require a group of people who care
to pay attention and provide feedback (especially on the use
cases, though I'll volunteer to make the best start I can).


Brian Lloyd        brian@zope.com
Software Engineer  540.361.1716
Zope Corporation   www.zope.com