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Soap was supposed to be the enterprisey safe superset of XML-RPC. From my experience back at the beginning -- XML-RPC was slightly underspecified, and would ha

Soap was supposed to be the enterprisey safe superset of XML-RPC. From my experience back at the beginning -- XML-RPC was slightly underspecified, and would have used a bit more of a firm hand about clarification of what was legal and what wasn't. SOAP was wildly overspecified and complexified to the point that you needed an army of consultants. Which is just perfect for enterprisey stuff, since you conviently have an army of consultants that need to have something to do. IMHO, XMLRPC inhabited a middle ground that was washed away by REST and ajax/json type interfaces. It's an extra bit of complexity that's just not all that popular now, rather than a stunningly less complicated version of SOAP.

spolsky 16y ago
Yep... as I remember it, XML RPC was "specified" by Dave Winer, and it was really sloppy. As I remember, there was no discussion of character encoding in the spec, and if you read the spec literally, you actually HAD to generate invalid XML documents because the spec was written by someone who did not understand that there was such a thing as character encoding and that it was important. And Winer absolutely refused to add features or to allow any kind of process by which XML-RPC could evolve into something good enough to use. Then the Microsoft people who brought you COM in all its baroque loveliness got their hands on the concept and made an industrial strength, godforsaken, complex thing called SOAP. The problem with SOAP mostly stemmed from the fact that they thought that all the work would be done by compilers and IDEs and so forth... they thought all the programmer would do is click a button and hey presto they would be able to run one object on one server and another object on a second server, and who cares what happens on the wire protocol? It's the compiler's job! But that's a terrible recipe for interoperability.

spolsky 16y ago

Yep... as I remember it, XML RPC was "specified" by Dave Winer, and it was really sloppy. As I remember, there was no discussion of character encoding in the spec, and if you read the spec literally, you actually HAD to generate invalid XML documents because the spec was written by someone who did not understand that there was such a thing as character encoding and that it was important. And Winer absolutely refused to add features or to allow any kind of process by which XML-RPC could evolve into something good enough to use. Then the Microsoft people who brought you COM in all its baroque loveliness got their hands on the concept and made an industrial strength, godforsaken, complex thing called SOAP. The problem with SOAP mostly stemmed from the fact that they thought that all the work would be done by compilers and IDEs and so forth... they thought all the programmer would do is click a button and hey presto they would be able to run one object on one server and another object on a second server, and who cares what happens on the wire protocol? It's the compiler's job! But that's a terrible recipe for interoperability.