SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)
harmful.cat-v.org
SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)
1–10 of 92 posts
Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)
#2Wow. This sums up my entire exposure to SOAP over the last few months. Thanks for the humorous, yet factual exchange of information!
Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)
#3The 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.
Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)
#4I think it's a law that any protocol or technology with 'simple' in the name invariably isn't.
Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)
#5My worst memory of SOAP was dealing with an attachments API that required each byte in a byte array to be wrapped in an XML element.
You ended up transferring ~10x the size of the file. I suppose gzip would have helped somewhat.
Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)
#6My worst memory of SOAP was dealing with an attachments API that required each byte in a byte array to be wrapped in an XML element. You ended up transferring ~10x the size of the file. I suppose gzip would have helped somewhat.
My worst memory of SOAP is using it. Experienced it for the first time ever a couple of weeks ago (all I've used before now is ad-hoc JSON or XML apis, mostly JSON) and (knocks on wood) never, ever again. The article touches on a few of the things I really didn't like about it, the main one being the expectation that you will use tooling to generate code rather than the contract first, and that every time I hit a hurdle and switched to a different library, I had to start over.
Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)
#7I think it's a law that any protocol or technology with 'simple' in the name invariably isn't.
SMTP is really quite simple. Of course, the array of hacks that is a modern mail infrastructure isn't - from SPF via Bayesian spam filtering to MIME - but the protocol itself is, really, quite simple.
Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)
#8Reminds me of the "Why I hate frameworks" essay by Benji Smith.
Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)
#9My worst memory of SOAP was dealing with an attachments API that required each byte in a byte array to be wrapped in an XML element. You ended up transferring ~10x the size of the file. I suppose gzip would have helped somewhat.
[deleted]
Re: SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)
#10Some previously implemented projects implemented a SOAP prepaid account balance billing interface that runs in production today. Nobody is willing to touch the interface for modifications because every developer tasked to review proposed changes complain that it's way too brittle and prone to complexity.
This article is bittersweet because it sums up everybody's feelings pre- and post- implementation.