Re: Web Services War Stories

Yeah, I don't want this discussion to consume my weekend either. But thanks for the reply. I don't have experience with using Web Services for Interoperability between disparate systems. But protocols based on WSDL and SOAP throw up red flags in my mind when I read about them. I can kind of see the point about wrapping a request in a SOAP Envelope, but why would anyone ever wrap a response in one?

I'm impacted in a big way right now by a movement known as the School Interoperability Framework (or SIF) which has grown over the past 10 years and has become something of a barrier for small companies like ours to gain traction in the market for Student Information Systems. The data model has grown to 178 XML documents and something like 2,200 XML elements. A lot of public entities are requiring software vendors to support the specification. We have our work cut out for us.

-Nathan



----- Original Message -----
From: Aaron Bartell <aaronbartell@xxxxxxxxx>
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc:
Sent: Friday, January 27, 2012 4:22 PM
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Web Services War Stories

What do you think of WSDL and SOAP and associated frameworks?

After having lived in the space extensively for the past decade I can tell
you that most of the WSDL/SOAP stuff is a waste of time.  Classic over
architecting in my book given how much of the spec is actually used.
That's not to say there aren't some good ideas in the technologies, but
they purposely didn't try to make they syntax easy to understand because
they assumed tools would abound and hide all of the technology.

At the end of the day my favorite types of web services are as simple as an
inbound HTTP POST with concise XML and then the same concise XML for the
response.

For example, a web service need be no more complex than this for the
majority of interactions.

<xml>
  <p1>data</p1>
  <p2>data</p2>
  <parent>
    <list>data</list>
    <list>data</list>
    <list>data</list>
  </parent>
</xml>

Sure it needs to get more complex when talking about sending a full
purchase order, but many take it to crazy amounts of parent child
relationships in an effort to be organized.

I should probably get off my soap box before I get into a discussion that
ruins my weekend :-)

Aaron Bartell
www.MowYourLawn.com/blog
www.OpenRPGUI.com
www.SoftwareSavesLives.com