WSDL Binding Style and Encoding

Good article

Binding Styles = RPC or Document.
Binding Use = Encoded or Literal

WS-I Basic Profile 1.1 prefers the use of literal encoding here.

After reading a bit more I think I understand the history behind encoding. The SOAP specification was actually written prior to the adoption of the W3C XSD spec. Since the XSD spec had not yet been adopted, another way of encoding type information had to be used and SOAP encoding was born.

Once XSD was adopted, serialization to various programming language types was possible. JAX-RPC does just that for java. It maps java types to XML Schema Elements.

So, unless I find a VERY good reason to use SOAP encoding, I shant.

Web Services Standards gone wild

I started reading an interesting article talking about the complexity of Web Services.

A certain consultant gave his opinion here.

An even more notable person, Tim Bray created a blog entry loyally opposing the WS-* craze. Tim Bray is notable because he's one of the fathers of XML. His argument against the WS-explosion is that many of the standards appear to NOT be coming from industry experience - theory before practice.

Have we advanced far enough to be able to threorize standards that end up being practical without taking some hard hits in the ring? The jury's out with me. I'm just at the point of trying to catch up a bit on where Web Services have gone since I've not paid enough attention to it over the last year. Stay tuned. I try to always have an opinion :-)