So my day job involves designing and building a Web service for use by customers. We started out by building a service designed to meet the needs of a particular client, but I immediately started working on something generic right after. I began by looking at the SOAP option, but I wound up building the service using HTTP POST and an XML document as the response (in what I guess would be called a REST approach). I abandoned SOAP because I was in a hurry and the toolkits looked hard to use and I was intimidated by interop issues. Anybody can formulate a regular HTTP request and parse an XML document.
The upcoming question is whether to go back and build a SOAP interface as an alternative to the REST interface. Here’s a post from James Governor pointing out that developers just don’t care for SOAP, which certainly mirrors my own experience.
Update: Karl Martino forwards a quote from an interview with Flickr CEO Stewart Butterfield:
Koman: Do you see Flickr and its open API as representing a next generation of web services? What things can developers learn from what has happened with Flickr?
Butterfield: On the strictly practical side, I think we had one person inquire about using the SOAP version of the API. I don’t know if any apps were actually built. There is at least one application built on XML-RPC. But all the others–I don’t even know how many there are–are built on the REST API. It’s just so easy to develop that way; I think it’s foolish to do anything else.
I definitely think REST wins the popularity contest. Most of the clamoring for SOAP seems to come from people with an interest in buzzword compatability.
Web services, where do we go?
So my day job involves designing and building a Web service for use by customers. We started out by building a service designed to meet the needs of a particular client, but I immediately started working on something generic right after. I began by looking at the SOAP option, but I wound up building the service using HTTP POST and an XML document as the response (in what I guess would be called a REST approach). I abandoned SOAP because I was in a hurry and the toolkits looked hard to use and I was intimidated by interop issues. Anybody can formulate a regular HTTP request and parse an XML document.
The upcoming question is whether to go back and build a SOAP interface as an alternative to the REST interface. Here’s a post from James Governor pointing out that developers just don’t care for SOAP, which certainly mirrors my own experience.
Update: Karl Martino forwards a quote from an interview with Flickr CEO Stewart Butterfield:
I definitely think REST wins the popularity contest. Most of the clamoring for SOAP seems to come from people with an interest in buzzword compatability.
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