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We have the misfortune of dealing with a third party SOAP API at my office. My coworker did it the "correct" way, autogenerating thousands of lines of C# from t

We have the misfortune of dealing with a third party SOAP API at my office. My coworker did it the "correct" way, autogenerating thousands of lines of C# from the WSDL and trying to get the objects transparently serialized and deserialized. That turned out to be a multi-week effort, so finally I got fed up and spent 4 hours writing code to directly extract the values we needed from the raw XML.

vyrotek 16y ago
I'm no fan of SOAP, but as a C# guy I'm curious to know what took so long?
- silverbax88 16y ago
  I've got the same question. But I've written them in both Java and C#. I worked on a project recently where we had a team of Java guys who worked on a SOAP implementation for a month. They could not get it to work in any way, shape or form. It was handed to me, and three of us did it a half an hour. All custom SOAP, still worked. I just don't comprehend why this seems so hard to people on Hacker News. SOAP is just another protocol and as messy as any other.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    > SOAP is just another protocol and as messy as any other. I think that's where you and most of the other people on the thread are losing it. SOAP is way messier than just good old REST. (disclaimer: I've never been forced to actually use SOAP.)
    - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
      I have had to do both: SOAP is WAY more messy.
- orangecat 16y ago
  I'm not sure of the details. I vaguely recall there was a version mismatch with the provider's API, and at one point they were sending UTF-8 data when the header said UTF-16, or vice versa.
  - GFischer 16y ago
    I've had that problem before, it's not hard to fix if the provider helps (OTOH if the provider doesn't, I guess some hacks should do the trick as well). I'm not at the office so I don't have the code at hand.
contextfree 16y ago
If you have a narrow use case for a vast XML API/file format this is always the right approach (whether it's SOAP or not).

vyrotek 16y ago

I'm no fan of SOAP, but as a C# guy I'm curious to know what took so long?

silverbax88 16y ago
I've got the same question. But I've written them in both Java and C#. I worked on a project recently where we had a team of Java guys who worked on a SOAP implementation for a month. They could not get it to work in any way, shape or form. It was handed to me, and three of us did it a half an hour. All custom SOAP, still worked. I just don't comprehend why this seems so hard to people on Hacker News. SOAP is just another protocol and as messy as any other.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  > SOAP is just another protocol and as messy as any other. I think that's where you and most of the other people on the thread are losing it. SOAP is way messier than just good old REST. (disclaimer: I've never been forced to actually use SOAP.)
  - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
    I have had to do both: SOAP is WAY more messy.
orangecat 16y ago
I'm not sure of the details. I vaguely recall there was a version mismatch with the provider's API, and at one point they were sending UTF-8 data when the header said UTF-16, or vice versa.
- GFischer 16y ago
  I've had that problem before, it's not hard to fix if the provider helps (OTOH if the provider doesn't, I guess some hacks should do the trick as well). I'm not at the office so I don't have the code at hand.

contextfree 16y ago

If you have a narrow use case for a vast XML API/file format this is always the right approach (whether it's SOAP or not).