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On the Death of SOAP
I just put up a post at Between the Lines on the death of SOAP.
The challenge for the RESTful crowd is to create a well-thought out transport alternative to SOAP. HTTP is the basis for that transport, but it’s not enough. The place to start is with service description and data binding so that RESTful Web services can enjoy the same kind of discovery that possible with SOAP. Paul Prescod made a start with his WRDL proposal, but it hasn’t really taken off.From » On the death of SOAP | Between the Lines
Referenced Fri Mar 25 2005 09:32:37 GMT-0700 (MST)
Update: A comment at Between the Lines mentioned Dave Orchard’s WSDL 2.0 description of Yahoo! Search Web services.
Posted by windley on March 25, 2005 9:30 AM
Comment from Randy Charles Morin at April 1, 2005 8:30 AM
People like REST because it looks very simple. But IMHO SOAP isn't really all that more complex. Look at a minimal REST and SOAP message, they are not far from the same (just a wrapping envelop/body). That little extra complexity, allows for everything else. It's not bound to HTTP, WS-Security, WSDL. I still agree they mucked up SOAP in 1.2 (took the simple out), but enterprise Web services will need the flexibility of the SOAP envelop. I'm currently working on one such enterprise application. Nobody is mentionning REST, because it just doesn't go that extra yard.
By the way, WRDL is unnecessary as WSDL is not bound to SOAP. In fact, I'm pretty certain WSDL 2.0 fully supports REST.