[FoRK] SOAP vs REST

[Stephen D. Williams]

Sometimes I'm glad I stay clear of areas that make me queasy.  I only 
saw enough CORBA action to know that it was broken.  I did a bit too 
much DCE RPC programming in SunOS so that when Microsoft pulled it in 
several years later, I completely ignored their derivative.  I did my 
own port of Kerberos to HPUX 3 or 4 in about 1990 so I avoided Active 
Directory later.  OK, bad example, I've just been setting up and 
debugging Kerberized PKI SSH...

I feel vaguely guilty at not participating in this stuff because I would 
have howled at many of the design decisions, especially the pre-doc RPC 
style.  And concentrating on half-duplex, synchronous HTTP rather than 
on something like BEEP.  (HTTP 1.1 could be used inefficiently to 
implement something close to BEEP, and some use it that way, but it is 
not the default SOAP mode which is a great loss.)  I was busy doing 
other things, and I probably wouldn't have been able to route the 
Microsoft / IBM juggernaut that seems to have done an Ada on the whole 
thing.  (I.e. taken some good, but immature ideas and too-quickly 
inflated them into products with unearned mass.)

Part of my focus now is a completely different direction with 
RDF-derived data interchange.  XML is OK at low complexities, but a mess 
further down the spectrum.  Clean XML object/document paired with 
RDF/triples/n-tuples seems to make sense.  But first, I'm working on a 
personal utility and building my way up.

More than a year ago we designed and built an XML RDF over BEEP over 
XML-RPC between Java and C# which worked nicely, if slowly.

sdw

Paul Jimenez wrote:
> http://wanderingbarque.com/nonintersecting/2006/11/15/the-s-stands-for-simple/
>
> Dug this up somewhere and found it still appropriate as I watch the
> dev team I joined recently deal with having to evolve and support the
> SOAP/XML-RPC API that they used in the intreest of expediency in the
> early days. I winced when I saw it first, but lately have grown somewhat
> tired of trying to convince philistines of the errors of their ways - it
> tires me out and annoys the philistines.
>
>   --pj
>
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swilliams at hpti.com http://www.hpti.com Per: sdw at lig.net http://sdw.st
Stephen D. Williams 703-371-9362C 703-995-0407Fax 94043 AIM: sdw