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It's articles like this that tell you we're close to peak hype. There's nothing revolutionary about a text encoding plus a schema. SOAP could do this 20 years a

It's articles like this that tell you we're close to peak hype. There's nothing revolutionary about a text encoding plus a schema. SOAP could do this 20 years ago.

AnotherGoodName 1y ago
SOAP was worse than horrendous though. I’m sure i’m not the only one hit by ‘well Java SOAP and .net SOAP encode differently so they don’t work together well’ (let alone all the other different implementations each with their own similar differences). Or how about ‘oh it looks like your client is using SOAP 1.2 but the server is 1.1 and they are incompatible’. That was seriously a thing. Good luck talking to many different servers with different versions. SOAP wasn’t just bad. It was essentially only useable between same languages and versions. Which is an interesting issue for a layer whose entire purpose was interoperability.
rikafurude21 1y ago
This reminded me of that HN comment on the Dropbox announcement post where the user says that theres nothing new about it since FTP and USB-sticks exist. Also, anyone who ever had the misfortune of using SOAP know how horrendeous it is. Truth is, sometimes the "new thing" does it better and wins out. Applications have standardized APIs now because of AI hype. This is a step in the right direction
- data-ottawa 1y ago
  Being able to plug MCPs into my desktop Claude app has been awesome. I gave it a K/V store and access to my project folder and it uses the tools very well with minimal guidance. Today there's no way I can talk an average person into getting MCP working without them having to modify some config files hidden away somewhere. I would bet big money that as soon as Claude and ChatGPT add 1 click "app store" experiences everyone will be using them in a week. It is not easy to "just" use an API as a human, plus a lot of APIs force you to deal with tokens and storing+executing code. In some cases it's easier for the LLM to simply fetch or curl basic APIs directly than waste context tokens on the overhead of an MCP tool call (e.g. all these weather tool examples), but with MCP consistency is much better, so depending on the use case MCP vs API both have advantages. Since my comment is already pretty long: LLM+RSS+Fetch is a killer combination for me, and it's almost all off the shelf these days. Once I add an RSS merge tool I think it will be an excellent way to consume content.

It's articles like this that tell you we're close to peak hype. There's nothing revolutionary about a text encoding plus a schema. SOAP could do this 20 years ago.

AnotherGoodName 1y ago

SOAP was worse than horrendous though. I’m sure i’m not the only one hit by ‘well Java SOAP and .net SOAP encode differently so they don’t work together well’ (let alone all the other different implementations each with their own similar differences). Or how about ‘oh it looks like your client is using SOAP 1.2 but the server is 1.1 and they are incompatible’. That was seriously a thing. Good luck talking to many different servers with different versions. SOAP wasn’t just bad. It was essentially only useable between same languages and versions. Which is an interesting issue for a layer whose entire purpose was interoperability.

rikafurude21 1y ago

This reminded me of that HN comment on the Dropbox announcement post where the user says that theres nothing new about it since FTP and USB-sticks exist. Also, anyone who ever had the misfortune of using SOAP know how horrendeous it is. Truth is, sometimes the "new thing" does it better and wins out. Applications have standardized APIs now because of AI hype. This is a step in the right direction

data-ottawa 1y ago
Being able to plug MCPs into my desktop Claude app has been awesome. I gave it a K/V store and access to my project folder and it uses the tools very well with minimal guidance. Today there's no way I can talk an average person into getting MCP working without them having to modify some config files hidden away somewhere. I would bet big money that as soon as Claude and ChatGPT add 1 click "app store" experiences everyone will be using them in a week. It is not easy to "just" use an API as a human, plus a lot of APIs force you to deal with tokens and storing+executing code. In some cases it's easier for the LLM to simply fetch or curl basic APIs directly than waste context tokens on the overhead of an MCP tool call (e.g. all these weather tool examples), but with MCP consistency is much better, so depending on the use case MCP vs API both have advantages. Since my comment is already pretty long: LLM+RSS+Fetch is a killer combination for me, and it's almost all off the shelf these days. Once I add an RSS merge tool I think it will be an excellent way to consume content.