From: Adam Rifkin -4K (adam@XeNT.ics.uci.edu)
Date: Thu Aug 10 2000 - 19:55:02 PDT
From the "Visions of a Two Way Web" Department...
http://scriptingnews.userland.com/pictures/viewer$520
...I spent a few minutes today trying to find an openly available Web
Service. [A world of Web Services is coming, right?]
The first openly available SOAP service I could find on the Web adds and
subtracts two numbers. A simple calculator written by Don Box...
http://soap.develop.com/xsltwire/client.htm
Hopefully Web Services will start popping up all over the place soon,
the way Web Pages started popping up all over the place in 1993 and 1994...
| <html>
| <body>
| <table>
| <tr><td/><td><input type="button" value="Add"
| onclick="javascript:add()"/></td><td/></tr>
| <tr><td><input value="9" name="a" /></td><td/><td><input value="4"
| name="b" /> = </td><td><span id='outdiv' >?</span>
| </td></tr>
| <tr><td/><td><input type="button" value="Subtract"
| onclick="javascript:subtract()"/></td><td/></tr>
| </table>
| <script>
| function doit(xreq)
| {
| var hreq = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
| hreq.open("POST", "http://soap.develop.com/xsltwire/calculator.xslt",
| false);
| hreq.send(xreq);
| if (hreq.status != 200)
| outdiv.innerHTML = hreq.responseText;
| else
| {
| var dom = new ActiveXObject("MSXML.DOMDocument");
| dom.loadXML(hreq.responseText);
| outdiv.innerText = dom.selectSingleNode("//result").text;
| }
| }
|
|
| function add()
| {
| var xreq = "<env:Envelope "
| + " xmlns:env='http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/'"
| + " xmlns:enc='http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/'"
| + "
| xmlns:icalc='uuid:84124454-ff27-4c41-8f21-dff5f2aa241d'"
| + "><env:Body><icalc:Add><a>" + a.value + "</a><b>" +
| b.value
| + "</b></icalc:Add></env:Body></env:Envelope>";
| doit(xreq);
| }
|
| function subtract()
| {
| var xreq = "<env:Envelope "
| + " xmlns:env='http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/'"
| + " xmlns:enc='http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/'"
| + "
| xmlns:icalc='uuid:84124454-ff27-4c41-8f21-dff5f2aa241d'"
| + "><env:Body><icalc:Subtract><a>" + a.value + "</a><b>" +
| b.value
| + "</b></icalc:Subtract></env:Body></env:Envelope>";
| doit(xreq);
|
| }
| </script>
| </body>
| </html>
---- Adam@4K-Associates.Com[John] Montgomery says there's no way today to represent any arbitrary object model in a rich way on any operating system and then communicate over the Internet. "What SOAP says is 'let's agree on the wire format.' So it's very simple to take a Corba application and build a SOAP adapter for it that will spit out these XML messages, and you can send them over the Internet to my COM application." In other words, it's the Web Services concept -- where you take a website, treat it as a component, and program against it through a common transport description format. It's SOAP as IDL, with XML as the lingua franca.
SOAP lets Microsoft paint a topsy-turvy picture where Corba vendors like Iona, ObjectSpace, and Rogue Wave sign on the SOAP Train alongside open source players including Userland, Secret Labs, and Digital Creations. It's a world where Microsoft can out-Sun Sun. "They're scared," says Montgomery. "They're realizing that once you have standard XML on the wire, their lock-in that they're trying to get with Java goes away."
Watch -- this gets better: "Sun's value proposition for Java has been write once, run anywhere -- build your application logic, use our APIs, our programming language, our environment, stick it on all your platforms and somehow magically the world will be all better. But you have to retrain all your developers in the Java language; getting the Java VM to behave the same on all the different platforms is an iffy proposition." And the punch line: "It's a rip-and-replace solution."
-- Steve Gillmor, February 2000, http://www.devx.com/upload/free/features/entdev/2000/02feb00/os0002/os0002.asp
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