Re: Web Services War Stories

Okay, I admit that Web Services have been around for at least a decade. Maybe we can say that they are STILL the method du jour for intersystem interoperability, and probably will be for a long time to come.

Regarding SOAP being heavyweight, is that something that people just learn to live with, or is it a choice? That is, if you buy into the frameworks that support it, do you just go with the flow, because it's easiest? If you're a producer of Web Services do you just publish that way by default? Would you have to go out of your way to simplify the interface?

I read that WSDL/SOAP have the benefit of publishing to a UDDI directory so people can more easily find your service. Does that affect the decision?

-Nathan





----- Original Message -----
From: "Dean, Robert" <rdean@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc:
Sent: Friday, January 27, 2012 5:12 PM
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Web Services War Stories

Web Services have been around for a while, so there's nothing really du jour about them.

In both .net and Java, there are free tools (WCF and JAX-WS) that make working with web services pretty easy.  The developer essentially constructs the object model, marks the classes/methods they want to expose, and the system does the rest.

That being said, SOAP is a very heavyweight message format for small messages.  In most cases, you're better off using a simpler format like JSON or a custom XML schema than SOAP.  However, there are a few cases  where SOAP has addressed things that would be hard to re-do in custom formats.