www.tasteslikepurple.com

OK so is anyone else wondering what's happened to SOAP? I remember a couple of years ago SOAP was all the rage. By allowing websites to communicate and transfer data in an easy to use method that was almost seamless to the app developer was just awesome. I did my share of SOAP deving, used SOAP to make a web service for an old site to handle my blog which made my life a lot easier. For the app developer SOAP was amazingly powerful and easy to use, just grab a SOAP library and away you went. With just a couple of extra lines of code you could turn your PHP script into a SOAP app.

But nowadays it seems that unless it's a browser driven call nobody wants to touch it. AJAX, REST, JSON, Flash(well Flash was always a contender but moreso again) and the other client side technologies have seemed to take over the web app space. Don't get me wrong I'm not against these new technologies, I've dabbled in AJAX and think the idea of dynamic client updating of only specific parts of the page is great, it's just that we had a perfectly good framework for app development that is now languishing in obscurity when it's still a perfectly valid answer to many of todays needs.

I've been reading some recent posts by Dare Obasanjo about GData and some of the issues with implementing a good data transmission standard. With many of the problems being pointed out as proper data type definitions and the flexibility to be able to define custom structures, something that SOAP takes care of very handily. The other major issue pointed out was data freshness which will almost always be an issue when dealing with clients talking with a multi-user server, the sugesstion of using versioning for the stored data would help mitigate this but it's not a perfect solution.

I know that my view of things is being tainted because I've always been more of a desktop application developer than a web application developer, but I've found that on average code is code. Seeing SOAP pushed to the wayside becuase it's not easily directly callable through Java-script is a shame. I've looked into direct calls to SOAP from javascript and must say I am a bit disappointed in Microsoft. Firefox/Mozilla have a fairly decent looking solution in the form of javascript objects to do the calling for the script. Microsoft on the other hand seems to make you hand build the XML to pass into the call, bad form guys, especially for a company that was one of the biggest supporters of SOAP with it's entire .NET platform being based on it. I may have missed some great method that everyone else knows of, if I have please enlighten me because I would love a simple, cross platform way to call SOAP from the browser.

I guess for now I must lament the passing of a protocol that, to me at least, had far more potential than most people gave it credit for and have now tossed aside like so many other pieces of tech because something newer and shinier has come along.

-nurple