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

[Hildo Biersma]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2007 at 07:43:13PM +0100, john_oshea at wordbank.com wrote:
> 
> 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)?

It's hand-generated code (more so on the Java side; perl is often more
table-driven and especially Merijn is a wizard in packing a lot of SOAP
functionality in a subroutine and four hashes) it leads to the
interfaces being relatively "chunky", i.e. you don't expose trivial
services.

A lot of apps also communicate through MQ (a messaging system) with XML
messages; again, manual generation/parsing.

> 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.

At OSCON 2007, I got the impression that ever more services are becoming
RESTy and offer return document types in addition to XML, e.g. you have
a choice of XML, JSON or CSV.  It looks like Google moved their search
API from SOAP to REST as well (not sure about their other APIs).

>From my limited viewpoint, SOAP is moving to the "within an enterprise"
world and REST is taking over the "across the Internet" role.

Hildo