Is it typical for a provider of a web services to also provide client libraries?
- by HDave
My company is building a corporate Java web-app and we are leaning towards using GWT-RPC as the client-server protocol for performance reasons. However, in the future, we will need to provide an API for other enterprise systems to access our data as well. For this, we were thinking of a SOAP based web service. In my experience it is common for commercial providers of enterprise web applications to provide client libraries (Java, .NET, C#, etc.).
Is this generally the case?
I ask because if so, then why bother using SOAP or REST or any standard web services protocol at all? Why not just create a client libraries that communicate via GWT-RPC?