Why use SOAP?

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Why use SOAP?
by Flavio on Thursday 23/Jun/2005, @15:06

"en:SOAP/en:WSDL is probably the best choice since it can deliver semantics (as opposed to en:XML-RPC) and is an accepted industry standard also used by e.g. google"

Please consider REST style web services, which, IMHO, are much easier to use and more powerful. Read this article for quick introduction to REST: http://www.xfront.com/REST-Web-Services.html

For more info, there is a wiki: http://rest.blueoxen.net/

Related Links

·   Articles on KDE Official News
·   Also by Flavio
·   Contact author

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Re: Why use SOAP?
by other ac on Thursday 23/Jun/2005, @15:30

REST?? IMHO AJAX is teh cool & more appropriate.

http://www.sagal.com/ajax/

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Re: Why use SOAP?
by ltmon on Thursday 23/Jun/2005, @16:41

I think you've got the wrong idea.

AJAX is at it's heart a presentation technology, not a web service technology. An AJAX application may connect to a web service to retrieve data, but is not the enabling technology for the web service itself.

The main web service technologies are:
- SOAP (venerable, complicated, powerful, standard)
- XML-RPC (much simpler, but missing some power)
- REST (believed by many to be the best of both worlds)

L.

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Re: Why use SOAP?
by other ac on Thursday 23/Jun/2005, @17:01

Unfortunately for you, I'm afraid I can't express my disdain about these silly acronyms you so favor any better than the link I provided in the previous post.

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Re: Why use SOAP?
by Maarten ter Huurne on Thursday 23/Jun/2005, @18:02

If I understood correctly, REST isn't really a technology, it's more like a design approach to web APIs. While SOAP tries to solve everything inside SOAP itself, REST means you rely on existing mechanisms (URLs, HTTP) as much as possible.

I wouldn't be surprised if KDE will choose REST eventually, just like DCOP was developed on top of existing mechanisms (ICE) when CORBA turned out to be too complicated.

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Re: Why use SOAP?
by KDE User on Thursday 23/Jun/2005, @21:25

> If I understood correctly, REST isn't really a technology

Absolutely correct. Rest is what you do when tired you are. Soap is what you use when bath you take.

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Re: Why use SOAP?
by fp on Thursday 23/Jun/2005, @23:52

Yoda Talk is what you do, when you watch too much Starwars.

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Re: Why use SOAP?
by Richard Moore on Friday 24/Jun/2005, @02:09

Here is some information on REST: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/12/01/restful-web.html

Rich.

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Re: Why use SOAP?
by Jason Keirstead on Friday 24/Jun/2005, @08:36

AJAX is not a technology *at all* - it is a buzzword co-opted by Adaptive path to describe a technique for asynchronous data retrieval by using the XMLHttpRequest pbject, that they like to think they invented.

Too bad web developers (such as myself) had been doing this for years earlier.

AJAX is not a protocol - the protocol is HTTP. It is not a data format - the data format is XML and/or JSON. It is just a buzzword.

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Re: Why use SOAP?
by Jim on Friday 24/Jun/2005, @09:19

I agree completely. SOAP is hideous compared with REST (which is actually just a buzzword; REST simply means "use HTTP properly").

"SOAP is probably the best choice" sounds like somebody who isn't very familiar with web services thought that the only options were SOAP and XML-RPC, and took five minutes reading FAQs to decide that he preferred SOAP. It does not sound like an informed, considered opinion and hopefully it will change.

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agreed - REST has much more potential
by A. Random Troll on Friday 24/Jun/2005, @10:02

Making all of the GFDL text corpus processable via REST would be a very very very good thing indeed - please see this slashdot.org comment: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=153801&cid=12901846

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