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REST is the new SOAP

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Re: REST is the new SOAP

#331

Post by jwilk »

hamilyon2 wrote: post #329
deniska wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTTP server following the spec can omit the body from a GET request.

I'd love to see a document defining this. I could not find such to the date.

RFC 2616 §4.3 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-4.3):

if the request method does not include defined semantics for an entity-body, then the message-body SHOULD be ignored when handling the request.

Now, RFC 2616 is obsolete, and I couldn't find such explicit wording in the superseding RFC 7231. But §4.3.1 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-4.3.1) says:

A payload within a GET request message has no defined semantics; sending a payload body on a GET request might cause some existing implementations to reject the request.

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#332

Post by tatersolid »

pjmlp wrote: post #297
wobbleblob wrote: post #55

It turns out that schema-first design is useful. It turns out that having a cross-platform industry standard for such schemas is useful. What developers didn't like about SOAP aren't necessarily the features, it's all the XML.

XML is great, allows lots of tools to be used.

Ahh, to be young and naive.

Decades of horrific developer pain disagree with you. The “tools@ all have different ideas of what is correct, good style, the right name spacing and encodings...

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#333

Post by carc »

bbarn wrote: post #13

Why is REST so popular? Because it's easy to implement and works for lots of use cases. I'm sorry that you found places it doesn't, but in the real world, having been through that SOAP pain it's being compared to, I'd say there's not even a comparison. Everyone seems to want to find a reason to dislike product/technology/feature X but in this case, X is just better than anything we've had for a 90% adoption case. Wha…

> Why is REST so popular?

You think this guy is a hateful hipster, but most of what he says probably resonates with most software vets. To me, it's mostly against the REST zealots who demand REST is done in a very particular manner. I've seen companies with a very stable, robust RPC framework that had a small faction of REST zealots who were extremely against it because it didn't do things according to REST. It didn't matter to them how stable it was or how well it worked.

Also, REST is relatively not popular - what percentage of the world's APIs use REST do you think?

TBH, you're the one coming off like the hateful hipster to me.

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#334

Post by karmajunkie »

cptskippy wrote: post #194
bbarn wrote: post #13

Why is REST so popular? Because it's easy to implement and works for lots of use cases. I'm sorry that you found places it doesn't, but in the real world, having been through that SOAP pain it's being compared to, I'd say there's not even a comparison. Everyone seems to want to find a reason to dislike product/technology/feature X but in this case, X is just better than anything we've had for a 90% adoption case. Wha…

> that SOAP pain The pain you're referring to is relative to the language you used and when you touched it. SOAP is a comprehensive and we'll defined specification and when implemented properly you forget it's there because it just works. After about 2003 major vendors had their implementations locked down pretty well. In Visual Studio you just implement a basic controller and the remainder is configuration. If you w…

> when implemented properly you forget it's there because it just works.

I think that's the link missing for most developers. SOAP was intended to allow machine-generated SDKs to remove all of the sharp edges of dealing with it, and in that regard it was largely successful. What brought it down was the advent of non-"enterprise" web development—development happening outside of a .Net or Java IDE that generated code for you. If you ever had to handroll a wrapper for a SOAP endpoint though, god help you. I honestly believe SOAP was the thing that made XML seem uncool by comparison to JSON and REST. JSON still doesn't solve data representation problems as well as XML, we've just learned to accept "good enough" in its stead.

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#335

Post by karmajunkie »

bvrmn wrote: post #148
bbarn wrote: post #13

Why is REST so popular? Because it's easy to implement and works for lots of use cases. I'm sorry that you found places it doesn't, but in the real world, having been through that SOAP pain it's being compared to, I'd say there's not even a comparison. Everyone seems to want to find a reason to dislike product/technology/feature X but in this case, X is just better than anything we've had for a 90% adoption case. Wha…

> Why is REST so popular? REST is not popular, there are only a few RESTful public API in the wild. The rest (unavoidable pun, sorry) are simple HTTP APIs with JSON serialization which maps with various degree of coupling to internal data layer. The main cause you don't need REST limitations to achieve same goals. OP has strong opinion about why we need to reimplement rpc over http every time for every application an…

This is the no-true-scotsman fallacy applied to REST. In point of fact, if REST has been around for nearly 17 years and there are so few of these APIs in the wild, then its been incredibly unsuccessful in its aims.

The truth is that these sites are, in fact, RESTful and that REST is just mediocre at what it professes to do. The requirement to treat all operations as resources + HTTP verbs is the primary leaky abstraction that everyone seems to want to gloss over.

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#336

Post by karmajunkie »

nickbauman wrote: post #209
bbarn wrote: post #13

Why is REST so popular? Because it's easy to implement and works for lots of use cases. I'm sorry that you found places it doesn't, but in the real world, having been through that SOAP pain it's being compared to, I'd say there's not even a comparison. Everyone seems to want to find a reason to dislike product/technology/feature X but in this case, X is just better than anything we've had for a 90% adoption case. Wha…

REST allows you to make decisions about the http interaction out-of-band, where SOAP provides (and often requires) the ability to describe all decisions about types and parameterization and exception cases in-band. The REST way allowed one to get started with something small and simple that people could agree to just by talking it over together. With SOAP you had to make all those decisions up front and put it in the…

> I believe SOAP is so complex that it's an analog to CORBA/IDL.

SOAP was intended to facilitate the same programming model but more loosely coupled. So that's not at all far off. And for what it intended to be—a specification for machine-generated bindings and SDKs—it was quite successful. It just didn't make the usability leap over to web development that happens outside an IDE.

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#337

Post by pjmlp »

tatersolid wrote: post #332
pjmlp wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XML is great, allows lots of tools to be used.

Ahh, to be young and naive. Decades of horrific developer pain disagree with you. The “tools@ all have different ideas of what is correct, good style, the right name spacing and encodings...

I have been coding since the mid-80's.

Feels refreshing to be called young.

Just this week I was having the pleasure of using XSD schema validation to ensure files aren't corrupted.

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#339

Post by dajt »

bbarn wrote: post #13

Why is REST so popular? Because it's easy to implement and works for lots of use cases. I'm sorry that you found places it doesn't, but in the real world, having been through that SOAP pain it's being compared to, I'd say there's not even a comparison. Everyone seems to want to find a reason to dislike product/technology/feature X but in this case, X is just better than anything we've had for a 90% adoption case. Wha…

I don't follow links to medium.com for that reason. I'm getting old and grumpy and medium.com posts seemed authored specifically to irritate me.

I'm not part of the new world so I guess I don't feel at home there.

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#340

Post by collinmanderson »

cptskippy wrote: post #194
bbarn wrote: post #13

Why is REST so popular? Because it's easy to implement and works for lots of use cases. I'm sorry that you found places it doesn't, but in the real world, having been through that SOAP pain it's being compared to, I'd say there's not even a comparison. Everyone seems to want to find a reason to dislike product/technology/feature X but in this case, X is just better than anything we've had for a 90% adoption case. Wha…

> that SOAP pain The pain you're referring to is relative to the language you used and when you touched it. SOAP is a comprehensive and we'll defined specification and when implemented properly you forget it's there because it just works. After about 2003 major vendors had their implementations locked down pretty well. In Visual Studio you just implement a basic controller and the remainder is configuration. If you w…

> PHP and Python have had SOAP libraries for a decade but they require considerably more effort to even consume SOAP. I have never tried to stand up a SOAP Service with them but I can't imagine it's any good.

I've tried suds and zeep. They both didn't really work in my specific cases. My strategy from now on is to write a bit of code in Visual C#, then analyze the xml traffic, and then generate that same XML using Python/PHP. The SOAP protocol is actually pretty simple once you know how it works.

SOAP has a lot of problems, but it's pretty amazing that you don't need a client side library to use it in Visual C#.

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