hop-by-hop contract between a SOAP node and the next SOAP

[Dan Drillich]

Good Day,

SOAP, for some reason empathizes the multi-hop paradigm. I don't really understand its importance. Any thoughts?

For example, SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism says -

Use of the Abstract SOAP Transmission Optimization Feature is a hop-by-hop contract between a SOAP node and the next SOAP node in the SOAP message path, providing no mandatory convention for optimization of SOAP transmission through intermediaries.

Regards,
Dan

[Jimmy Clark]

A SOAP message can be passed along to a variety of intermediary systems before arriving at its final destination. The importance of this is to not restrict or limit the processing of a SOAP message to a strict point-to-point communication path.

[R Srini]

I was looking at some examples of WS-Addressing at Javapassion and I see where its used to specify the next node to hop to using wsa:To. Is there is different place/standard to specify all of the hops for a given soap message, e.g. is there something like this:

<hops>
<hop sequence="1" address="http://address1" />
<hop sequence="2" address="http://address2" />
<hop sequence="3" address="smtp://address3" />
<hop sequence="4" address="someotherprotocol://address4" />
</hops>

just made that up

Is there a standard for this? Or is this provider-specific, i.e. the way to do it is different for Sun and IBM (for example)?

Thanks!