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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] 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+fools 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+fools&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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