[OAI-implementers] SOAP-PMH

[Matthew Cockerill]

I disagree.

Sure, in functional terms, a SOAP implementation won't offer anything 
that isn't available with the current HTTP/GET implementation.
That's like saying that HTTP isn't worth supporting because it can't do 
anything you can't do with your own ad hoc protocol over TCP/IP.

The reason that HTTP is worth supporting is that there are tools 
(browsers, client libraries, proxies etc) that support it.

And the same is true of SOAP. For better or worse, SOAP is the best 
supported standard for making web services (such as OAI-PMH) available.
And this means that there are high level tools for working with SOAP 
available in  essentially all major programming languages.
This makes writing robust clients and glue to consume the service 
*dramatically* easier. And this in turn will increase uptake of the 
service.

Matt


On 7 Dec 2004, at 21:08, Pete Johnston wrote:

> As Jeff noted a couple of messages upthread, the issue is not SOAP v
> OAI-PMH, or search v harvest, but whether an implementation of OAI-PMH
> semantics over SOAP offers anything that is not available using the
> current implementation over HTTP GET/POST.