On Wed, 2005-06-01 at 02:25 +0200, Pedro Santos Gómez wrote: > Once said that, in the following map: > http://www.mono-project.com/Image:Monocomponentsmap.png > > I see that "Soap Web Clients" and "Soap Web Servers" > have same colour as ADO.NET (which is not the cyan > colour - called "Patent free", neither the green > colour - part of the Mono stack). > > But, what I'm wondering is basically that, in the same > way I might use GDA instead of ADO.NET, or GTK# > instead of Windows Forms, there is any component > "safer" ... than the Web Services from ASP.NET. > And, if there is no one, what is the worst case that > could happen?
I know of no equivalent to System.Web.* for SOAP services. I also wouldn't worry about it, at least for SOAP services, as SOAP is a W3C recommendation, and W3C doesn't accept recommendations that have RAND patent licenses (or any other patent license except "free for all implementations of the recommendation", though Microsoft & co. have tried to change the W3C requirements...). Anything NOT part of SOAP or covered by a W3C recommendation may be suspect, though, such as the object <=> XML mapping patent that Dan Maltes mentioned. As for the worst that can happen... You couldn't be able to use System.Web.* anymore, and would have to listen to port 80 directly, grab the XML, throw it into System.Xml.* (part of ECMA), and parse it manually. This would be annoying, but not terribly difficult, and this would be an unlikely requirement (again, because SOAP/XSD/etc. are W3C recommendations). (Now, playing devils advocate, if Microsoft could get a patent on an API, then System.Web.* could be covered, and a different API would need to be written. However, considering that people have tried copyrighting/patenting GUI menu systems and the USSC didn't buy the argument, I don't think this will actually be an issue. Compatibility is too strong a reason to discount...) - Jon _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - [email protected] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list
