61–70 of 92 posts
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Big companies and their commercial interests.
Why in an earlier age, did DCE fail so miserably? It was amply backed by ginormous corporate interests.
Why did SOAP win, and XMLRPC not win?
Soap was supposed to be the enterprisey safe superset of XML-RPC. From my experience back at the beginning -- XML-RPC was slightly underspecified, and would have used a bit more of a firm hand about clarification of what was legal and what wasn't. SOAP was wildly overspecified and complexified to the point that you needed an army of consultants. Which is just perfect for enterprisey stuff, since you conviently have a…
- I spend less money on resources (SOAP, lotion, etc)
- I get clean faster -- SOAP used to slow me down
- Using someone else's shower is easy, I just take my towel. I don't have to worry if their SOAP is compatible with me.
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 reques…
Worse still, I've (recently!) wrapped an XML api that cares about the document-order of sibling elements. It might as well be a binary format if I have to copy your request examples and can't use a bog-standard XML parser/generator.
It's developed by a man named Jeff Ortel (on behalf of Red Hat, I believe), and it kicks the pants off of SOAPpy/ZSI/wsdl2py or whatever else you're using. You're welcome.
Step 1: Ignore all tools which supposedly make things easier (very important)
Step 2: Find the web service API documentation
Step 3: Ctrl-C example XML request
Step 4: Ctrl-V example XML request into program, replacing appropriate parts with program variables
Step 5: Parse the response. You're on your own here... Godspeed. :)
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I'm no fan of SOAP, but as a C# guy I'm curious to know what took so long?
I've got the same question. But I've written them in both Java and C#. I worked on a project recently where we had a team of Java guys who worked on a SOAP implementation for a month. They could not get it to work in any way, shape or form. It was handed to me, and three of us did it a half an hour. All custom SOAP, still worked. I just don't comprehend why this seems so hard to people on Hacker News. SOAP is just an…
I think that's where you and most of the other people on the thread are losing it. SOAP is way messier than just good old REST.
(disclaimer: I've never been forced to actually use SOAP.)
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?
I 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.