All well and good, but in practice if you want to interoperate with .Net and
WebSphere you need to talk SOAP / Web Services. (Disclaimer: I haven't had any
experience with Web Services / SOAP / XML-RPC apart from reading a few articles
and checking out some example code)
Apparently Web Services aren't too hard to implement (with Domino both being a
producer and consumer) in Domino 6 given all the extra XML functionality
they've added to the base classes.
I agree though from what i've seen of SOAP and what i've seen of XML-RPC, is
that SOAP is pretty messy by comparison. Not to mention the one implementation
of SOAP under Domino i've seen used string manipulation functions
(Instr/Left/Right/etc) to parse the XML rather than the XML classes (this is
the "official" Lotus example, mind you), also the response packet was generated
using string concatenation.
My theory is that they wanted to show how "easy" it is to do SOAP with Domino,
so they wanted to minimise the amount of code, there's a bit more overhead
loading the XML into a DOM tree and getting the information the right way.
It saddens me because people that don't know any better will base production
code off this Lotus example and a few months down the track wonder why their
implementation isn't very flexible :(
All well and good, but in practice if you want to interoperate with .Net and WebSphere you need to talk SOAP / Web Services. (Disclaimer: I haven't had any experience with Web Services / SOAP / XML-RPC apart from reading a few articles and checking out some example code)
Apparently Web Services aren't too hard to implement (with Domino both being a producer and consumer) in Domino 6 given all the extra XML functionality they've added to the base classes.
I agree though from what i've seen of SOAP and what i've seen of XML-RPC, is that SOAP is pretty messy by comparison. Not to mention the one implementation of SOAP under Domino i've seen used string manipulation functions (Instr/Left/Right/etc) to parse the XML rather than the XML classes (this is the "official" Lotus example, mind you), also the response packet was generated using string concatenation.
My theory is that they wanted to show how "easy" it is to do SOAP with Domino, so they wanted to minimise the amount of code, there's a bit more overhead loading the XML into a DOM tree and getting the information the right way.
It saddens me because people that don't know any better will base production code off this Lotus example and a few months down the track wonder why their implementation isn't very flexible :(