4 ms·

The S stands for Simple (2006)

74 points by jsingleton 11y ago

hackcasual 11y ago
SOAP in a nutshell: > SG: Well, officially none. But you can potentially support any of ‘em. And there’s lots of platforms that support JMS, and FTP, and SMTP. > Dev: Does anyone actually use these other transports?
- ksherlock 11y ago
  Just wait... I predict a Show HN: SOAP over (nntp/finger/bitcoin block) written in (go/rust/coffeescript/haskell) within 24 hours.
  - hackcasual 11y ago
    I doubt SOAP is cool enough to attract the go/rust/etc... crowd. So back in SOAP's infancy, company firewalls were a fucking mess, so being able to use something that was likely to just work across myriad internal networks was a boon. I'm a suspicious man, and am willing to bet the whole "we're transportation agnostic" was more a smoke screen for "we need to drill holes in your firewall" than a particular architectural love for passing SOAP messages over SMTP.
    - 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
      Go isn't cool I hope, but clojure is definitely cool. I know because they have long, sometimes blue, hair.
  - rwmj 11y ago
    How about SOAP written using OCaml with macros? http://git.ocamlcore.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=ocsoap/ocsoap.git;a=tree;f=src;h=3c2c51074973b2d0c1d07fb9443622f2cda8a189;hb=HEAD http://git.ocamlcore.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=ocsoap/ocsoap.... Back when I wrote that I was trying to call the Google AdWords API -- it was entirely SOAP based, and awful (still could be for all I know).
    - hackcasual 11y ago
      Oof. I guess I shouldn't hate too much as there are still some API's out there that use it. Exchange I'm looking at you.
mrspeaker 11y ago
Meta question: is there a sneaky HN term for when an article gets to the front page by being referenced in another article that is on the front page? (this one is from the WCF post). Something like "Piggy Linking"... but better...
- et1337 11y ago
  Side channel attack
nraynaud 11y ago
There is the same trend now with javascript. Before you could run javascript in your browser. Now, you need to transpile it from ES6/coffeescript, then you need to use the dependency manager with some npm/yeoman files, then you have grunt to configure for some reason, then you need to configure your framework specific tools (ember-cli etc.), wait! Did you compile your templates? And then you have exactly what java was criticized for, a ton of configuration and loads of crud around your code.
- pavlov 11y ago
  And it's always "death by a thousand papercuts". The configuration files and build system layer creep happens with the best of intentions. That interesting new transpiler, interesting new package management abstraction, interesting new declarative UI concept, interesting new tool to help with FooBar instantiation... A few years pass, and the act of changing anything in the application will require working around bugs in an old transpiler that can't be updated because of mysterious bugs that some code relies on, configuring dependencies in an obscure package system, converting HTML into a UI layer that's a complete mismatch for the application's present design, and converting "new" calls manually into some upside-down system that is there only because of novelty value years ago.
- braythwayt 11y ago
  Thankfully, I’m a Ruby Guy. All you do is buy a Mac, then install rvm because the version is wrong, plus use bundler because global state is a terrible idea for gem dependencies, and you need to have the right bit of Xcode Command Line Tools going to compiler native gems, and if you’re head by one version you get compiler errors, and...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- davegauer 11y ago
  And I completely understand the desire for these tools. I really do. Further, I'm okay with having maybe, say, one of them in my project's ecosystem. But I've seen way too many tiny, tiny JS projects recently that are completely dominated by enormous build systems. I'm skeptical that some folks are actually mastering all of the tools they're using right now. And if they are, how are they still finding time to work on the their own application? I'm still learning these tools as they pop up, but only so that I know what I'm opting out of when I keep them out of my projects. :-)
smhenderson 11y ago
Well after reading that I don't feel so bad for giving up on trying to learn all about SOAP back in the day. I remember trying to work how to use a SOAP API from FedEx and getting so frustrated that I googled "SOAP is dead" and lo and behold, I was not the only one... Long live REST!

74 points by jsingleton 11y ago

SOAP in a nutshell: > SG: Well, officially none. But you can potentially support any of ‘em. And there’s lots of platforms that support JMS, and FTP, and SMTP. > Dev: Does anyone actually use these other transports?

ksherlock 11y ago
Just wait... I predict a Show HN: SOAP over (nntp/finger/bitcoin block) written in (go/rust/coffeescript/haskell) within 24 hours.
- hackcasual 11y ago
  I doubt SOAP is cool enough to attract the go/rust/etc... crowd. So back in SOAP's infancy, company firewalls were a fucking mess, so being able to use something that was likely to just work across myriad internal networks was a boon. I'm a suspicious man, and am willing to bet the whole "we're transportation agnostic" was more a smoke screen for "we need to drill holes in your firewall" than a particular architectural love for passing SOAP messages over SMTP.
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
    Go isn't cool I hope, but clojure is definitely cool. I know because they have long, sometimes blue, hair.
- rwmj 11y ago
  How about SOAP written using OCaml with macros? http://git.ocamlcore.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=ocsoap/ocsoap.git;a=tree;f=src;h=3c2c51074973b2d0c1d07fb9443622f2cda8a189;hb=HEAD http://git.ocamlcore.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=ocsoap/ocsoap.... Back when I wrote that I was trying to call the Google AdWords API -- it was entirely SOAP based, and awful (still could be for all I know).
  - hackcasual 11y ago
    Oof. I guess I shouldn't hate too much as there are still some API's out there that use it. Exchange I'm looking at you.

mrspeaker 11y ago

Meta question: is there a sneaky HN term for when an article gets to the front page by being referenced in another article that is on the front page? (this one is from the WCF post). Something like "Piggy Linking"... but better...

et1337 11y ago
Side channel attack

nraynaud 11y ago

There is the same trend now with javascript. Before you could run javascript in your browser. Now, you need to transpile it from ES6/coffeescript, then you need to use the dependency manager with some npm/yeoman files, then you have grunt to configure for some reason, then you need to configure your framework specific tools (ember-cli etc.), wait! Did you compile your templates? And then you have exactly what java was criticized for, a ton of configuration and loads of crud around your code.

pavlov 11y ago
And it's always "death by a thousand papercuts". The configuration files and build system layer creep happens with the best of intentions. That interesting new transpiler, interesting new package management abstraction, interesting new declarative UI concept, interesting new tool to help with FooBar instantiation... A few years pass, and the act of changing anything in the application will require working around bugs in an old transpiler that can't be updated because of mysterious bugs that some code relies on, configuring dependencies in an obscure package system, converting HTML into a UI layer that's a complete mismatch for the application's present design, and converting "new" calls manually into some upside-down system that is there only because of novelty value years ago.
braythwayt 11y ago
Thankfully, I’m a Ruby Guy. All you do is buy a Mac, then install rvm because the version is wrong, plus use bundler because global state is a terrible idea for gem dependencies, and you need to have the right bit of Xcode Command Line Tools going to compiler native gems, and if you’re head by one version you get compiler errors, and...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
davegauer 11y ago
And I completely understand the desire for these tools. I really do. Further, I'm okay with having maybe, say, one of them in my project's ecosystem. But I've seen way too many tiny, tiny JS projects recently that are completely dominated by enormous build systems. I'm skeptical that some folks are actually mastering all of the tools they're using right now. And if they are, how are they still finding time to work on the their own application? I'm still learning these tools as they pop up, but only so that I know what I'm opting out of when I keep them out of my projects. :-)

smhenderson 11y ago

Well after reading that I don't feel so bad for giving up on trying to learn all about SOAP back in the day. I remember trying to work how to use a SOAP API from FedEx and getting so frustrated that I googled "SOAP is dead" and lo and behold, I was not the only one... Long live REST!