Comments on: Techy Miscellaney

By: Pete Prodoehl

Pete Prodoehl — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes I wonder if it’s just the hacker mentality or instant gratification, but whenever I dig into SOAP, I get bored with it and want to move on. When I dig into a RESTful API like Yahoo! has, it’s so darn quick and easy to kick out an idea that it gets done before I ever get a chance to be bored with it. In fact, I get done, and am still excited about it!

By: Sam Ruby

Sam Ruby — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

SOAP by Example: http://www.intertwingly.net/stories/2002/12/20/sbe.html

By: Antonio Cavedoni

Antonio Cavedoni — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Re: Googleâ€™s SOAP API vs a REST implementation, you might be interested in the XooMLe project, which is just that: a REST wrapper for the original API.

http://www.dentedreality.com.au/xoomle/

HTH, Cheers.

By: Adam Keys

Adam Keys — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Manual trackback, re: working with Windows
http://therealadam.com/weblog/archives/2005/03/09/a-unix-expat-in-a-strange-land-of-windows/

By: Craig

Craig — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I've never used REST, but I've lost all interest in the WS-* menagerie. This is a case of a standards body with a solution looking for a problem. IMHO, standards bodies are perfectly horrible sources of innovation.

First; build a prototype of a widget that solves a problem. Open source the widget. If the community decides the widget is good, then look to standardize the solution to the problem. The most importatnt part is the of software darwinism that is exerted by the developer community.

By: Jeremy Dunck

Jeremy Dunck — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Les, what you’re missing about using REST is that tools vendors can’t target you. Hence no marketing and no IDEs. And, arguably, no advancement. Hey, one thing you -can- say about SOAP is that they just. keep. making. more. specs.

By: Roger Benningfield

Roger Benningfield — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t use SOAP much myself, but Macromedia embedded it pretty deeply into Coldfusion MX. The result is that SOAP services are ridiculously easy to deploy, because they’re built the same way you build everything else in CF.

For example, this is a local object definition with a single method:

This is the same object, exposed as a SOAP service:

All that changes is the value of @access. No fiddling with the DOM required… the developer doesn’t even have to think about XML, since it’s all handled for her.

By: Mark Eichin

Mark Eichin — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

But then, if really bright people like Norm Walsh ("Mr. Docbook") have trouble with WS-* (see his current blog thread on building a service) maybe there's something to the theory that they are as broken as they look :-) I'm certainly regretting a project choice to use SOAP about 2 years ago; the APIs that are actually getting used now are HTTP (not-even-REST) shims that make the SOAP calls underneath, but http support works and is efficient in every language that anyone actually uses, which isn't true of SOAP... I'm currently agitating for turning the stack inside out, and making the SOAP shims run on top of HTTP interfaces... and then give up on the SOAP parts if it turns out that they really get no developer traction. (Groove gets some blame for the SOAP hype, but it doesn't seem to have resulted in any actual code for this app...)