Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wil421 1177 days ago
I dislike SOAP and avoid working with it when I can. However, the WSDL is an excellent part of SOAP that really makes it easier to work with. Teams tended to over engineer their APIs and all kinds of cruft would develop. I like the HTTP operations with REST.

I can remember hardcoding and manipulating a bunch of non-sense legacy fields just to get a ticket created via their SOAP enterprise service bus. Not to mention all the operations that made no clear sense.
4 comments
foolfoolz 1177 days ago
soap may have taken liberties with http to get its work done (graphql: so what??) but it really felt like we reinvented the wheel. i was consuming massive wsdls in 2013/2014 and i consume massive open api specs in 2023. did anything actually improve?
link
tracker1 1177 days ago
Unless the implementation defines too many things as just "Object" and you're consuming from a stronger typed language... and the generated library doesn't give you anything resembling a real interface. I've used a dynamic language (Node) a few times to bridge such wsdl/soap services to consume from C# and similar.

Consuming SOAP/WSDL from languages other than the one it's published in isn't fun. Man, some of the PHP implementations were beyond horrible... well defined REST/RPC +_JSON is generally much easier in the end.

link
haburka 1177 days ago
> I dislike SOAP and avoid working with it when I can.

I disagree. I think personal hygiene is very important for in-office coworking.

link
tracker1 1177 days ago
> I dislike SOAP and avoid working with it when I can.

Well, I'm about to take a shower now, and shame on you.

link