[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: What does SOAP really add?
On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 03:20:45PM -0700, Dave Winer wrote: > > To me, the matter of hours suggests we're looking at a trivial test > > case, which doesn't prove anything either way. > > Hmmm. Consider this possibility instead. The SOAP toolkit they used has been > patiently tested against many popular SOAP implementations, and that work > wasn't for naught. When it came time to test the API, it worked. So what. All that demonstrates is that it is possible to re-invent XML-RPC with new tools. It also helps that the Google SOAP API is playing in a very well-worn portion of SOAP that's easy to test and interop. I shudder to think what will happen when someone tries to publish a SOAP API with a more complex schema. We won't get interoperability by waving the magic WSDL pixie dust, and we'd be significantly better off with some kind of task-specific XML document structure with REST. Amazon released an HTTP+XML API last week, and like the Google interface, it's a very simple operation. We're not trying to achieve interop with N x N peers; we're all trying to get *one* service to understand us, and understand what that *one* service is returning. It's not Google's (or Amazon's) responsibility to test N different client implementations anyway; it's their responsibility to publish a standard interface and adhere to it. The "SOAP brings interop for free" argument is simply a straw man. Especially when it necessarily prevents interop with a whole class of tools (XSLT processors for one). Z.
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