Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Where's the SOAP?

SOAP is boring, wake up Big Vendors or get niched "Evidence continues to mount that developers can' t be bothered with SOAP and the learning requirements associated with use of the standard for information interchange. It is often described as "lightweight", but its RPC roots keep showing.

Developers are turning their backs on the standard. Folks that is, building interesting information splicing apps--semantically rich platforms like flickr and Amazon are being accessed by RESTful methods, not IBM/MS defined "XML Web Services" calls. Now it seems the Creative Commons is responding to RESTful demand. Or more pertinently-not responding to SOAP demand because there isn't any."

"Whats a web service? Still a great question. But anyone that defines a Web Service using SOAP in the definition is missing out on where the action is. Distinctions between enterprise and "consumer" are breaking down. REST is evidently where that convergence is being played out, not WS-I."

Via Is SOAP a washout?.

Also, Interop is Hard: "If you find that you must use a toolkit to help with generating the contract, I'd recommend a technique that is similar to Steve's customer's: generate WSDL using a foreign toolkit, remove all unwarranted idioms and assumptions, and then try to import the result in the toolkit that you are using to develop the service."

Jon Udell had a very interesting post about Google's new map service (all plain XML/HTTP and XSLT where you want): Google Maps is a web of linked XML documents.

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