Stefano Mazzocchi wrote: > > Now, a technical question: we already have two projects which have a > pretty high overlap (SOAP and Axis). Why do we need another one? Can't > this "WASP lite" be donated as directly to Axis instead of creating yet > another project on webservices?
Brief history: IBM contributed SOAP4J to Apache, and it became SOAP 2.x and a fairly substantial number of features were added under the Apache Umbrella. At some point, it was agreed that fairly substantial internal restructuring was required to - among other things - move from a DOM to a SAX based parser, and create an architecture where people could plug in support for headers. Initially this was called SOAP 3.x. Since it was a massive change, we decided we wanted a separate cvs repository - like cocoon2 ultimately did, and xerces2 and tomcat4. At the same time, the W3C had accepted the SOAP 1.1 submission. Their first act was to rename the protocol to XP. Unfortunately, this conflicted with a then-unannounced operating system, so they renamed the protocol XMLP. We decided that naming the project after the old name would cause confusion, and decided to get off the merry-go-round, and come up with our own name. Ironically, the W3C later decided that changing the name from SOAP was not a good idea, and the next version of the protocol apparently will be called SOAP 1.2. Roughly at the same time, two individuals from a company then named IDOOX started contributing. Unfortunately, their company made a business decision to work on a separate code base, one that in 20-20 hindsight I'm sure that we all wish had been done differently. Now we have two code bases, each intending to be the successor to SOAP 2.x. Both created by Apache committers (presumably plus a few other people who work at Systinet). The code bases definitely deserve two separate cvs trees at this point - doing otherwise would be too disruptive. But I would like to see one set of committers - each with access to the other. I do not feel as strongly about the name. The closest analogy I can think of is the Catalina "revolution" in Jakarta Tomcat. - Sam Ruby --------------------------------------------------------------------- In case of troubles, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
