I think I found this a little late. Anyone who is contemplating working with SOAP or webservices simply has to read this. And if you have been already struggling with the specifications – read this and weep.
“The S stands for Simple” by Pete Lacey.
He’s got this interview on InfoQ as a follow-up.
Great timing for me personally, I was just contemplating options for Mylar integration with JTrac. I guess it is a toss-up between XML-RPC or REST now.
Update 2006-12-18: Well, I missed this part – the InfoQ write-up on the original post. Just as I was pondering that if Google uses SOAP for the search API, it can’t be that bad:
Among the many industry luminaries linking to Pete’s post are Nelson Minar, who designed the SOAP-based Google APIs for both Google’s search AdWords and says he’d never choose SOAP and WSDL again…
Wow.
Another Update 2006-12-26:… Google has deprecated the SOAP search API. Hmm. Some nice (admittedly biased) perspective here: The end of SOAP.
Slowly, all over the world, the lights on the SOAP endpoints are going out
