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by vertere 2899 days ago
Both well-defined protocols and vaguer design/architectural principles have their place. But is it a great idea to take a bunch of such principles and bundle them up under a (confusing) name? Perhaps not.

It seems to me that the initial popularity of "REST" was largely because it wasn't SOAP (and didn't have to be XML), but it was still a name you could give what you were doing that made it sound like you were following some sort of standard.
1 comments
silverbax88 2899 days ago
I had zero issues with SOAP. I had zero issues with REST, although I couldn't quite understand the proposed benefit. When people started moving to JSON, I thought, okay, this is literally taking everything that already works and just doing it in an even more complicated way.

It's not hard, but I see very few differences between them. SOAP is easier to read/edit, JSON has less overhead/data, and REST...well, nobody could decide what REST was, so they just made it up or ignored it.

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mwcampbell 2899 days ago
> I had zero issues with SOAP.

Just curious, what programming language(s) did you use to provide and/or consume SOAP APIs?

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cpburns2009 2899 days ago
I'm not the OP but I've used Python with the suds library to consume SOAP APIs. I haven't had any problems with it other than companies deprecating their SOAP APIs just to reimplement exactly the same thing with JSON.
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mwcampbell 2899 days ago
Ah, OK. I don't think suds existed when I first tried to access a SOAP API from Python in 2004. If it did exist, it was certainly obscure.

Perhaps my own experience trying to use SOAP can shed some light on why REST prevailed. In 2004, I tried to use the PayPal mass payment API from a Python application (in the now-defunct Quixote web framework). As I recall, I found one Python SOAP client library, but for some reason, I couldn't use it to access the PayPal API. It was all just so complicated. In desperation, I ended up writing a small service (micro-service?) to access the PayPal API using the official PayPal Java SDK. That service used Jython, because I just couldn't stand Java's verbosity. The main application communicated with the service using XML-RPC.

Compared to SOAP, when I discovered REST, it seemed refreshingly simple, built for the Web rather than awkwardly abusing HTTP as a transport for an over-complicated RPC protocol.

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silverbax88 2899 days ago
Quite a few over the years. .NET, Java mostly in the early days. Sometimes I would just write a parser in whatever language I needed.
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