Nathan
I guess when you are the consumer you have no choice but to use whatever the web service provider using. You cannot dictate to the provider the transport mechanism they should use for their web service, so whether SOAP is 100%, 60% or 1% you still may have to cater for it. The web services we have to call are all based around the industry we provide solutions for - browser based front-ends to subscriber management and billing systems. These may be IBMi based or they may not. We have to call web services that handle document management, letter writing, talking to addressable interfaces for set-top boxes, creating/retrieving customers, creating/retrieving orders...all sorts really.
If you have the tooling to handle WSDLs and SOAP then consuming and providing web services is like falling off a log. That is the trouble - we are an RPG shop so we don't have the tooling (or at least not to the level you have for other languages). We tried the IBMi XML Toolkit once (which generates C++ proxy classes from a WSDL) and called them from RPG. It was too buggy so we had to go with our own RPG solution. WSDL2RPG may help but I haven't tested it yet.
When we are providing web services we tend to stick to the simple XML POST approach because SOAP does nothing but provide us with an overhead we can do without. However, in doing so, we make life harder for our consumers - and we have to spend more time documenting how the service is supposed to work. We invariably get the question - where is your WSDL? I think Scott touched on this in his response earlier.
- Kevin
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Nathan Andelin
Sent: 27 January 2012 23:56
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Web Services War Stories
From: Kevin Turner
of the several disparate systems we have to interface with,
only about 60% of them use the WSDL/SOAP approach.
That's the kind of feedback I was hoping to get. 60% is quite significant. That makes WSDL/SOAP a factor to consider. Can you share a little about the types of requests you're getting for Web Services, or what you're using as a consumer?
There was some talk about using JSON rather than XML for data exchange. We see JSON all the time in web applications. But has it made the leap to Web Services?
-Nathan
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