6
Crost
4y

I tried SOAP for the first time today. It wasn't bad. I had a client for the service built automatically instead of writing my own.

Why is SOAP dead?

Comments
  • 21
    Because people work at home and stopped taking baths.
  • 15
    Because it's slow, painful to maintain, and you send a bucket load of more data per request then it's json counter part.

    Some receivers struggle with with whitespace and characters like & which need to be & 🤷‍♂️

    But.... despite it's pain, once you get it working for for a service, it's usually set and forgot.

    I've found SOAP based apis to be well documented though vs REST APis - but that could be just me 😅
  • 4
    You were lucky.

    Depending on what type of WSDL your soap service has, and what language you're trying to develop a client in, it can be anywhere from trivial to damn near impossible to automatically build a client. And even when you can, WSDL is often automatically generated in a way that makes no sense rather than written manually, so you need a wrapper round your auto generated client anyway.

    Plus, when you then come to upgrade the API, you have to generate a whole new client, which may or may not work.

    Add to that a whole bunch of other complaints like it's difficult to unit test, slow, horrendously inefficient, difficult to read and debug manually, etc. and Im very glad it's mostly dead.
  • 1
    Try using a soap service that doesn't publish it's WSDL to you. You'll pull your hair out and curse at it.
  • 2
    Soap alone is hardly specific - Soap 1.0... Soap 1.2... which WSDL spec?

    Soap is a mess. If it works, good.

    As long as the client stays the same. Client changes and you're dead.

    (Had the joy multiple times long ago. Some clients don't like X, others require X -t's fun)
  • 2
    @IntrusionCM this reminds me of services using node elements to seperate data, vs, using attributes in a single element, actually I have one currently that receives in node per data, but responds in attributes... coz fuck the world!
  • 0
  • 1
    @C0D4 that's a good representation of why I don't like XML as a data format.
  • 2
    Body wash > soap
  • 1
    My old job had several SOAP-APIs. The code was basically a legacy cluster fuck. Adding a new field took hours to get right and then you had to manually find and delete these fucking WSDL-cache files on test + production.
    No documentation (or automation), so it was up to me: I added a new field for a json-payload, documented it and rejoiced. It was magical: no xml-fuckery, no cache, no try-and-error, just add the damn data and done.

    Thinking back, this just a brain dead "solution", but it came in very handy several times!

    And that's why I don't like SOAP.
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