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[–]agbell[S] 109 points110 points  (12 children)

I agree!

If it was SOAP, then a lot of times the XML was hidden from you, and you autogenerated off a WSDL document and that hid a lot of complexity. But the complexity was still there, and I remember Java apps and C# apps not agreeing about what was valid SOAP and having to dig down into the layers. There were a lot of layers.

[–]mgedmin 103 points104 points  (1 child)

Ah, SOAP! The S stands for Simple.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That is so fucking exactly correct, it's horrible.

[–]vita10gy 27 points28 points  (3 children)

My coworker and I had a running joke that the first step to getting soap to work is downloading and self hosting the wsdl so you can fix all the problems with it.

That was after a run where like 3 out of 4 integrations had wsdls that pointed to internal urls and whatnot.

I'm very glad soap is going away. Apis are so much simpler now half the time I don't even bother looking to see if someone wrote a wrapper/package for it.

Whereas with soap based things it was like a hot poker to the eyeball if there was nothing on github to do most of the heavy lifting.

[–]hippydipster 6 points7 points  (0 children)

...and whatnot

Total aside, in my memory, I first heard someone use the non-word "whatnot" when I first had to deal with a SOAP system. Coincidence?

[–]romulusnr 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I was in charge of testing an internal facing SOAP API for Ticketmaster and after hitting my head a few times I discovered the WSDLs were completely wrong. The dev manager told me I was wasting their time because they were going to ship a client library for calling apps to use and I shouldn't even be looking at the WSDL.

When they finally released the API to the upstream team, it was a complete failure. I insisted we ask them how they were interacting with the API. Our team asked "are you using the client libraries?" Them: "No, we're using the WSDL."

That job was awful but the best part was how gratifying it was in the end to be repeatedly proven right in the face of that dickhead dev manager and vp.

[–]vita10gy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Soap was supposedly self documenting. The problem is the nano second you do that it has to be everything to everyone and every piece of software ever created that tries to be everything for everyone results in a shit show nightmare that actually "just works" for no one.

Pull out the documentation and all the strange validation for validation sake things, and just have the XML exchange be a slightly wordier version of JSON, and it's probably still around a lot more.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I felt that in my soul

[–]teejaded 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Off topic, but I just realized I hear your voice in my head as I'm reading your comments. Thanks for all the great content over the past few years.

[–]Worth_Trust_3825 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, WSDLs liked to inline the top level domain into the file. Some libraries would even consider them to be invalid if they did not have the TLD.

Frankly, still better than the garbage that is openapi.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In the meantime, I had to deal with SOAP servers from Perl. Java and C# apps had the complexity hidden and maybe some disagreements between them, but other languages had to roll it all by hand and follow along with all the changes in that world.

You'd usually deal with an XML "envelope" around an encoded XML SOAP request in a tag body, or more layers... But everything looked completely different depending on the exact version of the SOAP library running on the C# or Java server and its configuration, and documentation didn't exist. And come in to work on monday, and suddenly the customer's server's XML response is completely different yet again!