Article:		Beep BEEP!
Subject:		BEEP and HTTP
Date:		2002-10-25 11:33:58
From:		Mark Baker
Response to: BEEP and HTTP
HTTP is an *application* protocol. That should be your first hint that it's layer 7. 8-) The application code, like a browser, isn't part of the protocol stack because it's not a protocol; it's just code that uses the application semantics of the application protocol. I'm amazed how many people don't understand this. To refute my point about generality, you claim "HTTP was designed as part of a software architecture designed to meet the needs of an Internet-scale distributed hypermedia application", which is entirely true. But a "distributed hypermedia application" is exactly what a generalization of other forms of distributed computation looks like. As for network effects, having an app that know what the methods in one WSDL document means, and can even parse other WSDL documents, doesn't in any way help them understand what the methods in the other WSDL documents mean. There are no network effects there. On the other hand, having an app that knows what GET, PUT, POST means, can help it interact with anything that presents that same interface. This is REST's uniform interface constraint, and the reason Web services are not being deployed (and will never be deployed) in quantity on the Internet.

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