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If the REST architecture is sufficiently mature, it should be entirely discoverable, and in a much more granular fashion than SOAP, without any tool more comple

If the REST architecture is sufficiently mature, it should be entirely discoverable, and in a much more granular fashion than SOAP, without any tool more complex than curl. That's what HATEOS is all about. The difficulty is that saying that an interface is RESTful doesn't guaranee that: there's no naming difference between a service at level 3 on the Richardson Maturity Model, where this does apply, and one at level 1, where you can't even rely on HTTP verbs behaving predictably. As to the existence of sufficiently good toolkits, that won't save you in the face of vendor bone-headedness. Talking to .NET from a Java stack is still problematic, where either toolkit on its own is apparently fine on its own territory. There's a particularly fine example in MS Exchange Web Services, where getting Java to talk to it over SOAP is so fiddly they're releasing a Java port of their managed API.

trezor 16y ago
To be fair Exchange Web Services is a prime example (IMO) of how not to do SOAP. It's the philosophy of SOAP being "message-passing" taken to the extreme. You have the SOAP messages which envelopes (sigh) yet another message-level architecture where every request, even at OO level means constructing request-objects with millions of sub-properties, all types fitting an abstract inheritance tree. Which ofcourse is also what you get returned after sending your request. So then you have to start analyzing your response object (again a message-object enveloped in a SOAP-message) and anaylze what class it actually is and the same for all subproperties. I don't mind SOAP so much, but EWS can really go die in a fire. You can say whatever you want about SOAP in general, but EWS cannot really be used as an example of anything other than itself. I've never seen such a painful and convoluted solution anywhere else. Even if SOAP had been ditched and the wire-format used had been some sort of RESTFul implementation, it would still be a clusterfuck to use. Blaming SOAP here is IMO a bit misdirected.
- regularfry 16y ago
  I could eventually come to ignore the fundamental screwed-up-ness of the API if it didn't also mess with the protocol itself; Exchange.asmx dropping out an incomplete WSDL is icing on the fractally wrong cake.

trezor 16y ago

To be fair Exchange Web Services is a prime example (IMO) of how not to do SOAP. It's the philosophy of SOAP being "message-passing" taken to the extreme. You have the SOAP messages which envelopes (sigh) yet another message-level architecture where every request, even at OO level means constructing request-objects with millions of sub-properties, all types fitting an abstract inheritance tree. Which ofcourse is also what you get returned after sending your request. So then you have to start analyzing your response object (again a message-object enveloped in a SOAP-message) and anaylze what class it actually is and the same for all subproperties. I don't mind SOAP so much, but EWS can really go die in a fire. You can say whatever you want about SOAP in general, but EWS cannot really be used as an example of anything other than itself. I've never seen such a painful and convoluted solution anywhere else. Even if SOAP had been ditched and the wire-format used had been some sort of RESTFul implementation, it would still be a clusterfuck to use. Blaming SOAP here is IMO a bit misdirected.

regularfry 16y ago
I could eventually come to ignore the fundamental screwed-up-ness of the API if it didn't also mess with the protocol itself; Exchange.asmx dropping out an incomplete WSDL is icing on the fractally wrong cake.