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RE: Can you stand yet another SOAP-RPC vs HTTP GET question?

• To: "Mike Champion" <mc@x...>,"xml-dev" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Can you stand yet another SOAP-RPC vs HTTP GET question?
• From: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>
• Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 19:17:18 -0700
• Thread-index: AcHoEEYuZCAtiaYFRy2QbYQI4daUCAAALUqQ
• Thread-topic: Can you stand yet another SOAP-RPC vs HTTP GET question?

I believe the in-between the lines answer to your question is "SOAP is
more buzzword compliant than an HTTP GET of XML content" 

-- 
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You assume all risk for your use. (c) 2002 Microsoft Corporation. All
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Champion [mailto:mc@x...] 
> Sent: Friday, April 19, 2002 7:08 PM
> To: xml-dev
> Subject:  Can you stand yet another SOAP-RPC vs HTTP 
> GET question?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I asked the Google Web API people why they didn't just offer 
> a simple HTTP GET of an XML 
> result.   The (FAQ, I think) response was: "We chose to 
> deliver Google Web APIs via SOAP 
> because we believe that the SOAP developer tools make Google 
> Web APIs accessible to a broad 
> developer community."  OK, fair enough ... if we were talking 
> about some complicated 
> interface.  But we're talking about generating very simple 
> URIs for 99% of what people do with 
> Google.  
> 
> 
> For example, one question I ponder frequently "is the world 
> run by knaves or fools" is simple 
> to pose to the Google URI interface: 
> http://www.google.com/search?q=is+the+world+run+by+knaves+or+f
> ools  All I want is the option 
> to get the result in XML 
> http://www.google.com/search?q=is+the+world+run+by+knaves+or+f
ools&r=xml

Every language I use has a URL library and a string manipulation
library, and it would be easy 
to take an arbitrary query string, generate such a URI, do a GET on it,
and parse the XML 
response.  Wrap up this logic in a simple API! How much broader a
developer community could 
they want?.  One could easily add some options such as quoting the whole
phrase, or whatever.  

Granted, this only scratches the surface of what the Google API can do,
but then again 99% of 
the user's won't do anything more sophisticated (IMHO, anyway).  A
general URI interface would 
be at least as complex as the SOAP API, but that would be pointless --
SOAP RPC is good for 
representing arbitrary, complex argument lists, and few would object to
having that as an 
option.  I just resent having the complex, general solution forced on me
(assuming I want to 
access Google from a program) for simple everyday things.  

So, what am I missing here? I feel like I've gone senile or something.
[Back in mah day, 
Sonny, we had to concatenate strings by hand to build URIs, we didn't
have no fancy GUI's to 
generate WSDL to input to a binder to generate SOAP messages like you
young whippersnappers 
are usin']  Do most people in the "broad developer community REALLY want
to jump through hoops 
to avoid having to think about URIs?  Or is this example (involving all
strings rather than a 
mix of strings and integers and structures) just so much more trivial
than the "typical" SOAP- RPC problem that it's not worth thinking about?





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