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SOAP is terrible[1], but if the whole country is on board, change is very difficult and you're not going to move to anything simpler because it would either be

by toast0 11d ago

SOAP is terrible[1], but if the whole country is on board, change is very difficult and you're not going to move to anything simpler because it would either be too simple to actually satisfy the need or too simple to satisfy the selection comittee. [1] The whole thing with wsdl is like an elaborate prank. Without fail, the WSDL files are impossible to obtain and don't reflect the service as deployed or documented. Documented equivalent forms will not be treated as equivalent. Two instances of a 'standard' service will not accept the same XML. And I only worked with simple SOAP services with straight forward payloads.

doc_ick 11d ago
Unfortunately that seems like bad history. I’ve only had good experience with wsdls, internally and externally, but they were generated with the services and readily available.
- qw 11d ago
  I have the same experience as you. I have probably worked with a few dozen SOAP services in my time, so perhaps I have been "lucky", but WSDLs have not been an issue for me. WSDL is in some ways more user-friendly than openapi schemas. They have a rich set of types that mostly just work as expected. When I try to generate models from an OpenAPI JSON file, I often find myself either overriding the models or making scripts/plugins to rewrite the json to fix types. An example of this is using proper decimals instead of doubles, which is crucial in my line of work.
carefree-bob 9d ago
I've had positive experiences with wsdls, they offer a lot of advantages over REST/JSON, together with some up front onboarding costs. It really depends on the service, does it make it easy to obtain the wsdl and more importantly does it honor the type conventions. There is no getting around the fact that services need to maintain consistent behavior and document that behavior, the wsdl is just a transport layer for that organizational commitment. If you have the commitment, then you have a good experience, if you don't, you don't, and whether you are using JSON or SOAP doesn't matter.

by toast0 11d ago

doc_ick 11d ago

Unfortunately that seems like bad history. I’ve only had good experience with wsdls, internally and externally, but they were generated with the services and readily available.

qw 11d ago
I have the same experience as you. I have probably worked with a few dozen SOAP services in my time, so perhaps I have been "lucky", but WSDLs have not been an issue for me. WSDL is in some ways more user-friendly than openapi schemas. They have a rich set of types that mostly just work as expected. When I try to generate models from an OpenAPI JSON file, I often find myself either overriding the models or making scripts/plugins to rewrite the json to fix types. An example of this is using proper decimals instead of doubles, which is crucial in my line of work.

carefree-bob 9d ago

I've had positive experiences with wsdls, they offer a lot of advantages over REST/JSON, together with some up front onboarding costs. It really depends on the service, does it make it easy to obtain the wsdl and more importantly does it honor the type conventions. There is no getting around the fact that services need to maintain consistent behavior and document that behavior, the wsdl is just a transport layer for that organizational commitment. If you have the commitment, then you have a good experience, if you don't, you don't, and whether you are using JSON or SOAP doesn't matter.