"So the SOAP "stack" is a mess...

[Hildo Biersma]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2007 at 06:37:20PM +0100, john_oshea at wordbank.com wrote:
> > ..., and currently only the simplest of services are able to
> > interoperate. However we believe this situation is likely to improve
> > long term, ..., but mainly due to the emergence of a reference
> > implementation in the form of Microsoft's WCF.
> 
> [From: <http://www.w3.org/2007/01/wos-papers/bt>]
> 
> As a matter of interest[*], is anyone seeing any sign of "improvements"
> here? Is anyone using WCF to auto-generate, auto-deploy, auto-*anything*
> Web-Service-y? That's actually *useful*, that is?
> 
> In particular, I'm wondering about those of you working for larger
> companies where I'd guess this is more likely to happen. My gut feeling
> is 'no', but that may just be the crispy beef noodles from lunch messing
> with me.

In my workplace (large financial services firm), we use SOAP envelopes
to basically do XML-RPC.  This is after we were bitten severely in the
nineties by object versioning issues with CORBA.

So we basically don't call object methods across application boundaries,
we try and send more "service" type messages (without doing the whole
SOA thing).

We regularly get new developers wanting to do the whole code-generation
thing (and/or WSDL) but I don't see it happening successfully across the
boundaries of small, well-controlled projects.

Given that we have binary code running on Solaris 2.5 that needsto
inter-operate with today's latest and greatest, auto-generating anything
looks unwise to me :-)