Re: SAM: please make Jonathan Chawke a committer

[Sanjiva Weerawarana <sa...@watson.ibm.com>]

Sam Ruby writes:
>
> I doubt anybody would be opposed to improving documentation.  But, forgive
> me Jonathan, but I am not terribly predisposed to vote to give somebody
> commit access merely because they have stated an INTENT to improve the
> documentation.  There have been people before who have stepped forward and
> stated that they intended to improve the documentation, and never followed
> through.  Right Sanjiva?  ;-)

He has already done it and he even mailed you directly the link
to the FAQ he has written. Here's the link again if you missed it:
    http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=soap-user&m=98889006812049&w=2

There are now sufficient votes for him to be a committer and he has
already done the work. What's the problem?

> Not a consideration in my non-vote at the moment, but something I will
> mention anyway.  Axis is now at the point where it functionally does a
> number of things that xml-soap can not.  For example, it properly handles
> 2001 schema data types, can handle null values for primitive types, and
has
> a fair amount of infrastructure in place for handling headers - something
> that we see as becoming increasingly important over time.  Also, based on
> my measurements, it delivers the message to the method with twice the
speed
> of xml-soap *OVERALL*.  By overall, I am including the entire client,
> socket, servlet, and XML parsing in the equation.  Not too shabby.

Certainly. Great work Axis folks!

> So, my question to you, Johnathan, is do you want to invest some time in
> documenting how Apache soap WAS, or do you want to document how it SHOULD
> BE.  Note I said should be... I am not implying that this is the current
> state of Axis, but if you were to document clearly how an interface or an
> installation should work, we can work with you to either suggest
> improvements or adopt your suggestions and make the code match.

As you know, Apache-SOAP has quite a large user base. Moving to Axis is
clearly the strategic direction for Apache SOAP users, but Axis is not
there yet and is not fully backwards compatible (deployment descriptors,
serializers etc.). As such, the user base needs to be supported for
"some time." I don't know what "some time" translates to, but it is
clearly at least until a stable 1.0 release of functionally equivalent
Axis is available. The SOAP Attachments support is crucial for Axis to
be functionally equivalent. When do axis-dev folks intend to deliver
a functionally equivalent version?

I think it would be great if Jonathan would do his doc magic with Axis
too. However, let's not derail his invaluable contribution to making the
Apache SOAP docs better. It'll be great to have improved docs in Apache
SOAP v2.2 (the next release).

Sanjiva.