Servers supporting the Minimal Client

[Pim van der Eijk <pvde@sonnenglanz.net>]

Hi,

The following came up in a new AS4 project I've recently started working on:

The ebMS3 Core Specification states that "Because either packaging 
option can be used, implementations MUST support both multipart and 
non-multipart messages."

This is relaxed in the AS4 Minimal Client profile, which is a SOAP-only 
profile,  i.e. it states that "Support for attachments is NOT REQUIRED – 
i.e. an XML message payload will always use the SOAP body."  This is 
important as it enables implementations using toolkits that do not 
support SwA.

A Minimal Client needs to communicate with an AS4 server. 
Unfortunately,  AS4 does not define a Minimal Server profile,   but it 
is easily defined to be a server that support only the features the 
client users (e.g. only Username Tokens but not X.509). However,  it 
cannot be a pure subset of ebHandler as ebHandler does not have the 
constraint that no SOAP-with-attachments envelope but only simple SOAP 
is to be used.

Should we add a parameter to define packaging?  The PayloadProfile 
parameter (for which we already have EBXML-MSG-62, EBXML-MSG-63, 
EBXML-MSG-64) comes close but is more about the payloads than about the 
packaging.   Some products allow specifying the payload location to 
either SOAP Body or attachments,  but in at least one product a 
SOAP-with-attachments envelope is used even if there is only one payload 
and it's XML in the SOAP Body.

Kind regards,

Pim