[ome-devel] C/C++ client library for OME::Remote

[Chris Allan]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 09:56:50AM -0400, Harry Hochheiser wrote:
> 
> Chris:
> 
> My experience with these standards is admittedly quite limited, but I 
> think the potential benefits in terms of interoperatbiility and 
> adherence to community standards might make WSDL worth considering.  
> WSDL would allows us to support UDDI  for resource discovery, or 
> possibly to integrate with related biology service architectures like 
> BioMoby (biomogy.org). Furthermore, WSDL is used in the Grid Computing 
> world, so if we want to play in that arena...

Yes, yes and yes. All fine and dandy if you're using SOAP. I'm fully
aware of all of the above in terms of what most web services integrators
like to call "fair play." However, as I said we are not using SOAP and
are not likely, unless you're volunteering and would think it of great
benefit, to migrate the entire remote framework and Java client library
to SOAP.

The grid computing world, ah yes, with the largest project re-writing
its entire implementation twice and planning to do it again, I don't
think we're likely to jump on that boat. Not to mention they've got
their own extensions to SOAP to make it "secure."

> 
> I am well aware that there are reasons to not like SOAP - i wouldn't 
> advocate for making this change unless the benefits were clear. 
> however, it's worth considering.
> 
> In any case, I agree completely that documenting the XML-RPC calls 
> would be a great start. How hard would it be to automagically generate 
> some sort of appropriate docs from the Perl source code?

For that we would have to defer to Mr. Creager. :)

> 
> -harry
> 
> 
> >I'm not sure exactly why people are talking about WSDL. WSDL is 
> >designed
> >for SOAP, not XML-RPC. We have an XML-RPC web services implementation,
> >not SOAP. Why you'd need automatic stub generation and service
> >advertisment for such a simple RPC protocol I have no idea. Document
> >the exposed XML-RPC procedure calls and forget about a layer of complex
> >and overly verbose XML descriptors on top.
> >|..

Ciao.

-Chris