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SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)

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Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)

#21

Post by cperciva »

dminor wrote: post #4

I think it's a law that any protocol or technology with 'simple' in the name invariably isn't.

It's also a law that any field with the name 'science' in it isn't a science. (Health science, social science, military science, earth science, computer science...)

Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)

#22

Post by Sidnicious »

This is great. My (so far, only) experience with SOAP started when my boss asking me to investigate the new version of a (very big) vendor's SOAP API. Support for the old version of the API was being dropped in a few days.

It turns out that our framework has SOAP built in, so I had it suck in the WSDL and make a sample request. It was rejected with a generic error. As it turns out, our framework was generating requests that looked like this (simplified with much SOAP nonsense stripped out):

  
    …
…and the requests in the API documentation look like this:

  
    …
the difference being that our framework declares a "default namespace", while their API expected a "namespace prefix". As far as I could tell from reading the spec (always a bad sign when you're using a standard that both ends support) the difference shouldn't matter.

- - -

I went to my boss. He showed me the old code; all the requests it needs to make are hardcoded based on the docs, and substitute XML-encoded variables in the right places.

Save a few minor changes, that's the process we still use today, and it fucking works.

Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)

#23

Post by raganwald »

lkrubner wrote: post #3

The original article is here: http://wanderingbarque.com/nonintersecting/2006/11/15/the-s-... I am glad to see it get more attention. It is a classic and it is really about more than SOAP. It is about the way technologies get hyped and over-sold and over-promised, and then made unusably complicated. SOAP is just the example.

It is about the way technologies get hyped and over-sold and over-promised, and then made unusably complicated.

In the excellent book "Antipatterns," I recall that this is called a "Wolf Ticket:"

Wolf Ticket is a product that claims openness and conformance to standards that have no enforceable meaning. The products are delivered with proprietary interfaces that may vary significantly from the published standard.

http://sourcemaking.com/antipatterns/wolf-ticket

Wolf tickets are sold as safe choices because of their interoperability, but of course once you have anything non-trivial built upon them, you discover that the interoperability doesn't actually work and you are left locked into your vendor.

Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)

#24

Post by aidenn0 »

SOAP has always seemed bizarre to me. It's something like "We think CORBA was a good idea, but they messed some stuff up, so we'll toss the entirety of CORBA and make something with a completely new set of problems while completely ignoring most of the mistakes we learned with CORBA."

I'm still luke-warm at best on the whole ORB idea as-is, but even thinking from the point of view of someone who thinks object brokers are the best thing since sliced bread, I feel like the SOAP people got it very wrong.

Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)

#25

Post by adw »

cperciva wrote: post #21
dminor wrote: post #4

I think it's a law that any protocol or technology with 'simple' in the name invariably isn't.

It's also a law that any field with the name 'science' in it isn't a science. (Health science, social science, military science, earth science, computer science...)

Which is why my the department I'm an alumnus of called it Earth Science_s_ - http://www.esc.cam.ac.uk/ - which is fine: it's a coalition of mineralogy, mineral physics, petrology, paeleontology, geophysics and rheology...

Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)

#26

Post by tomelders »

I feel a bit sad for all those people who worked on SOAP. I assume most of them simply wanted to make the web better and now we all point and laugh at their efforts with the 20/20 vision that only hindsight can allow.

Thanks for trying SOAP people, it was a noble effort but it's game over I'm afraid.... oh wait, I just saw on Wikipedia that these were Microsoft people. In that case, screw em. SOAP is wank! YOU'VE WASTED YOUR LIVES!!

Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)

#27

Post by ahupp »

At one time SOAP wasn't too bad, until it tried to solve a lot of complicated problems (via WS-*), and in the process made the simple problems complex. Contrast this with HTTP which is being used for ever-more complex problems yet is really no more complicated in the simple case than it was in 2000. This seems like an important principle in protocol design.

Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)

#30

Post by wizard_2 »

jan_g wrote: post #11

Must be ~5 years since I last used SOAP. Needless to say I hated the stuff. Complex to build, complex to use (interoperability between different stacks - java/.net/... - was like 'cross your fingers and hope for the best'), complex to debug and walk through tcpdump network packets. It's complex in every way but the name. Of course, since that times I've alway advised against web services and so far I've succeeded in…

I'm being asked to create webservices so other developers don't do direct database access and their stuff wont break when things change. How do you manage that?
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