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

[john_oshea@wordbank.com]

Hildo Biersma wrote:
> 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.

So it's pretty much hand-generated code throughout? Do you do much
talking to the general public side of 'the outside world', or is it all
to a fairly fixed set of known external sources (if at all, come to
think of it)?

The reason I ask is that our company is at the planning stages for a
service we're going to offer to our customers. The initial thought was
 to do something nice and REST-y, but if a lot of MS-based outfits are
going to get consistent, if not particularly sane, SOAP "for free" then
that may cause a wee re-think.


> 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 :-)

:-)



-- 
John O'Shea
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