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Stop SOAP

stopsoap.com

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Re: Stop SOAP

#61

Post by i2pi »

Hi - I'm Josh - the guy behind Stop SOAP.

There is no political intent behind this site. It is meant to be a joke. A joke with a grain of truth.

Backstory: I was waiting for a conference call, saw that stopsoap wasn't registered and put this together in 15min.

Deeper backstory: I'm the co-founder & CEO of Simple.com. We deal with many SOAP APIs. The upside is that SOAP provides very clear specifications as to how the API is supposed to work. The downside, is that things rarely work as expected. It is frustrating, but such is life in banking.

On a more serious note, We're Hiring. If you'd like to work at Simple, where we replace you bank & give you clean REST APIs to your finances, check us out: http://simple.com

Re: Stop SOAP

#62

Post by Achshar »

Alright guys.. i'll admit, i dont get the joke. can any one explain? What's happening on that site and why do i see xml? (yes, i am still learning new stuff, like everyone else)

Re: Stop SOAP

#65

Post by Achshar »

chrisbolt wrote: post #63
Achshar wrote: post #62

Alright guys.. i'll admit, i dont get the joke. can any one explain? What's happening on that site and why do i see xml? (yes, i am still learning new stuff, like everyone else)

http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508/

Oh, i see, so it is some kind of communication protocol. But i am surprised i never heard of it even thought i have been writing/learning code for a few years now.

Re: Stop SOAP

#66

Post by seanalltogether »

nirvdrum wrote: post #46
seanalltogether wrote: post #14

I'll admit to being completely ignorant about the benefits of using SOAP to communicate between servers. However I can say that for server->client communication it is the worse data representation I've ever had to work with and I genuinely hope we see the end of it. JSON maybe not be perfect, but it's so much better at delivering a structured data model then xml is.

I think I'd like JSON as a data representation a lot more if schemas for it were more prevalent. I've noticed it's a lot harder to generate valid JSON -- or rather a lot harder to escape data. With XML, this is fairly trivial. Granted, my use case is considerably different from most. The other idea from SOAP I'd love to see applied to ReST is a descriptor document for the API. Given how poorly many ReST APIs are docu…

The strictness in generating valid json is exactly why i like it so much. I've worked with too many SOAP services with nodes and attributes thrown lazily around the document simply because xml is so unstructured. I do agree however that json could use a few more built-in data types to handle more complex use cases.

Re: Stop SOAP

#67

Post by nirvdrum »

sciurus wrote: post #56
nirvdrum wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'd like JSON as a data representation a lot more if schemas for it were more prevalent. I've noticed it's a lot harder to generate valid JSON -- or rather a lot harder to escape data. With XML, this is fairly trivial. Granted, my use case is considerably different from most. The other idea from SOAP I'd love to see applied to ReST is a descriptor document for the API. Given how poorly many ReST APIs are docu…

Does WADL provide what you liked about WSDL? http://www.w3.org/Submission/wadl/

I haven't heard of this before. But I'll be checking it out. Thanks for the info.

Re: Stop SOAP

#68

Post by RyanMcGreal »

Achshar wrote: post #62

Alright guys.. i'll admit, i dont get the joke. can any one explain? What's happening on that site and why do i see xml? (yes, i am still learning new stuff, like everyone else)

SOAP is a specification for exposing remote procedure calls via a web service. The client executes a SOAP request by making an HTTP Post request against a URL with an XML request body that specifies what remote procedure to call and what parameters to pass into it. The service, in turn, sends an HTTP response with an XML body that contains the return value from the procedure call.

SOAP services also usually include a WSDL, which is alternately said to stand for Web Service Definition List, Web Service Definition Language, or Web Service Description Language and is meant to define the methods and parameters available to the client.

Because the whole system is so complicated, cumbersome and over-engineered, the normal way to create a WSDL is to do it automatically using tooling. Unfortunately, different frameworks generate different and often mutually incompatible and non-interoperable WSDLs. So, for example, a .NET SOAP client might not be able to consume a WSDL generated by a Java framework.

The S in SOAP originally stood for "Simple", but the protocol is anything but.

Re: Stop SOAP

#70

Post by Achshar »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #68
Achshar wrote: post #62

Alright guys.. i'll admit, i dont get the joke. can any one explain? What's happening on that site and why do i see xml? (yes, i am still learning new stuff, like everyone else)

SOAP is a specification for exposing remote procedure calls via a web service. The client executes a SOAP request by making an HTTP Post request against a URL with an XML request body that specifies what remote procedure to call and what parameters to pass into it. The service, in turn, sends an HTTP response with an XML body that contains the return value from the procedure call. SOAP services also usually include a…

Yes that comment really helps but if i am getting it right, it is something like JSON, right? like JSON is used in public API's and all sorts of server-client communication. Any particular reason to take SOAP against something like JSON?
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