Copyright © 2002 W3C® (MIT, INRIA, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark, document use, and software licensing rules apply.
This document lists the work going on in the Web Services Activity regarding the description of message exchange patterns (MEPs).
The goal of the documents is to:
explain how to document a MEP.
list the MEPs developed within the Web Services Activity.
eliminate discrepancies.
This document has no formal status. It is a first version of an attempt to document message exchange patterns.
This version only lists the existing work done on this subject. Very little work has been done on analyzing the differences and conflicts between each approach yet.
1 What is a message exchange pattern?
2 Defining a message exchange pattern
3 Defined message exchange patterns
4 References
The SOAP definition given in [SOAP12 Part1] is: A MEP is a template that establishes a pattern for the exchange of messages between SOAP nodes.
| Editorial note: HH | 2002-07-22 |
| This definition should be added to the Web Services Glossary. | |
Generalized to Web services, a message exchange pattern is a template that establishes a pattern for the exchange of messages between two communicating parties.
MEP definitions will therefore be used by several technologies in the Web services architecture: communication protocols such as SOAP Version 1.2 (see [SOAP12 Part1]), description languages such as WSDL 1.2 (see [WSDL12])
[SOAP12 Part1] includes rules for defining MEPs.
[WSDL12] does not give formal rules about combining operations.
[SOAP12 Part1] and [SOAP12 Part2] has a much more formal description of MEPs.
[SOAP12 Part2] defines the following message exchange patterns:
[WSDL12] defines several combination of input and output as part of a PortType description:
Input-Output Operations.
Input-Only Operations.
Output-Input Operations.
Output-Only Operations.