SOAP - What's the point?

Posted by DanSingerman on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by DanSingerman
Published on 2009-03-26T16:50:42Z Indexed on 2011/01/11 16:54 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 254

Filed under:

rest

|

soap

|

rant

I mean, really, what is the point of SOAP?

Web services have been around for a while, and for a while it seemed that the terms 'SOAP' and 'Web service' were largely interchangeable. However SOAP always seemed unwieldy and massively overcomplicated to me.

Then REST came along, and suddenly web services made sense.

As Joel Spolsky says, give a programmer a REST URL, and they can start playing with the service right away, figuring it out.

SOAP is obfuscated behind WSDLs and massively verbose XML, and despite being web based, you can't do anything as simple as access a SOAP service with a web browser.

So the essence of my question is:

Are there any good reasons to ever choose SOAP over REST?
Are you working with SOAP now? Would it be better if the interface was REST?
Am I wrong?

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about rest

REST: How to store and reuse REST call queries

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
I'm learning C# by programming a real monstrosity of an application for personal use. Part of my application uses several SPARQL queries like so: const string ArtistByRdfsLabel = @" PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> SELECT… >>> More
REST Framework - MS Web Api vs the rest of the field

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
I am a .NET developer who is looking into the OSS world for a REST framework similar to Microsoft's Web Api. I'll be starting a personal project soon and need to develop both a web site and an API with the API coming first. I've ruled out Ruby on Rails just because I feel that with my background… >>> More
Self Hosted WCF REST Service or Hosting WCF REST Service in Console Application

as seen on C# Corner - Search for 'C# Corner'
n this article, I will show you How to create a REST based service, How to host a REST,based service in Console application and How to consume a REST Service at client. >>> More
Trouble determining proper decoding of a REST response from an ArcGIS REST service using IHttpModule

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
First a little background on what I am trying to achieve. I have an application that is utilizing REST services served by ArcGIS Server and IIS7. The REST services return data in one of several different formats. I am requesting a JSON response. I want to be able to modify the response (remove… >>> More
WCF REST on .Net 4.0

as seen on Geeks with Blogs - Search for 'Geeks with Blogs'
A simple and straight forward article taken from: http://christopherdeweese.com/blog2/post/drop-the-soap-wcf-rest-and-pretty-uris-in-net-4 Drop the Soap: WCF, REST, and Pretty URIs in .NET 4 Years ago I was working in libraries when the Web 2.0 revolution began. One of the things that caught… >>> More

Related posts about soap

Consuming a PHP SOAP WebService with ASP.NET

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I'm having some major issues trying to consume my PHP SOAP webservice using ASP.NET. The webservice in question is based on the PHP SOAP extension and is descibed by the following WSDL: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <definitions name="MyServices" targetNamespace="http://mydomain… >>> More
Sending a Soap Header with a WSDL Soap Request with PHP

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I'm extremely new to SOAP and I'm trying to implement a quick test client in PHP that consumes a ASP.NET web service. The web service relies on a Soap Header that contains authorization parameters. Is it possible to send the auth header along with a soap request when using WSDL? My code: php $service… >>> More
Error in PHP soap client to .NET soap Server

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
PHP soap client in attempting to interact with a .NET soap server results in the following error: [soap:Receiver] Server was unable to process request. --- Invalid length for a Base-64 char array. $credentials = array( 'RequestorUID'=> 'xxxx', 'RequestorPassword'=> 'xxxx' ); $param… >>> More
SOAP namespace from SOAP request

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
This request is generated when web service is called. Can you tell me what the namespace will be? I am confused <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <S:Envelope xmlns:S="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"> <S:Header/> <S:Body> <ns2:getNews xmlns:ns2="http://src/"> … >>> More
Accessing the Atlassian Crowd SOAP API with Suds (python SOAP library)

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Has anybody had any recent success with accessing the Crowd SOAP API via the Suds Python library? I've found a few people successfully doing it in the past but Atlassian seems to have changed their WSDL since then to make the existing advice not entirely helpful. Below is the simplest example I've… >>> More