Subject: [BEEPwg] JMXP

From: "Paul Andrews" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2003 09:30:09 -0400

My first thought on the JMXP proposal
(http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-harold-jmxp-00.txt) is that
it is a combination presentation and application layer. The presentation
layer is made up of elements like <arguments> and <value>, while the
application layer is made up of elements like <notification-listener
action="remove">.

I am on something of a crusade to press for separation of these two
layers in any standard where I see it. The main reason being that there
is a profilferation of XML presentation layers with every new proposed
XML based protocol. We already have a presentation layer that has very
wide tool support, namely: SOAP.

In order to pre-empt many people's automatic response to the acronym
'SOAP' I will say up front that I am not interested in hearing any
argument based on its supposed verbosity. I strongly believe, and I am
not alone in this, that any mature presentation protocol would present a
similar level of verbosity and that any actual verbosity that SOAP has
does not significantly impact network or application performance. I also
believe that SOAP's (perceived) shortcomings are strongly outweighed by
the community, vendor and tool support that it has.

Naturally, adopting SOAP for the presentation layer would still leave
the application layer protocol undefined and I believe that it is this
layer that any proposed standard should address.

To summarize I would like to see the JMXP proposal split into two:

1. An information model that defines the application protocol.
2. A presentation binding with SOAP being the preferred binding.

If SOAP is the preferred binding for the presentation layer, then the
session layers and below are already well defined, in particular
bindings are already defined for both BEEP and HTTP.

If there are reasons why SOAP should not be used for presentation layer
encoding (other than the 'verbosity' argument discussed above), I would
be very interested in hearing them.

Paul Andrews - Cisco Systems Inc.

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From: Dann Martens <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 11:05:08 +0200

I agree with your point of view. I don't think we need another 'custom' 
application specific protocol. Of course, JMXP is an interesting 
initiative in the context of the java JMX technology. But for 
heteregenous systems, SOAP is intended as the RPC (or RMI whatever you 
call it) protocol to rule them all. The (early access) Remote Access API 
for JMX allows for both approaches, but I wouldn't be surprised at all 
that designers have a JAX-RPC based (Sun's java SOAP 1.1 implementation) 
connector in mind for the next JMX Reference Implementation. Perl, TCL, 
or shell scripts will all have SOAP libraries (or binary tools) 
available, if they don't have them available already (I just haven't 
checked).

Let's put our effort at getting the industry to accept SOAP over BEEP 
(as we need HTTP put out to pasture), now that would be a worthy cause !

Kind regards,
 Dann