Potential IP (Patent, not Protocol) Troubles for SOAP 1.2

sckienle writes "Infoworld has an article on possible patent problems ahead for the SOAP 1.2 recommendation. Apparently two companies are claiming they may have patents that cover parts of the specification. But, they have yet to specify the relevant patent numbers or even how they feel there would be infringement. Here is The Register's spin on this."

Comments

Re:Why HTTP?

[King of the World]

HTTP as it turns out is a good general purpose protocol. It has download resuming, and compression (zip), and many other features that weaker protocols like FTP don't have. It's also being extended via WebDAV (webdav is mostly a subset but there are planned extensions). Regardless of whether it's a "text transfer" protocol, everyone uses it for images, pdfs and zips, and it's quite good at it.

SOAP isn't anything to do with HTTP. SOAP can go via SMTP for all it cares. People tend to use HTTP, but then they do that for many things anyway.

Also understand that - like the web - all SOAP applications don't need to store state. A stateful protocol would be overkill, when you can implement state in SOAP. HTTP works, and is very well understood by many people.

Finally, SOAP has a specific HTTP header that firewalls can recognise (and then block if need be). Considering that SOAP can be just a wrapper for a request that returns some xml it's often similar to submitting a query to google. It could be dangerous, but so is allowing all kinds of downloads, so you have to get into HTTP filtering anyway.