The New Web Math, Or How SOAP Adds Up To Nothing
Posted by harrisj Mon, 25 Apr 2005 07:06:00 GMT
Last week saw the intriguing web mashups of combining two popular web services in one place. So, first there was combining Craigslist Real Estate listings with Google Maps, which although slow is really quite amazing to behold. Then someone else hacked Gmail + Del.icio.us, using Google's mail service to capture contents on bookmarked pages at the bookmarking time. Not to mention Adrian's trailblazing mix of Google Maps and Chicago transit info.All of these are amusing and technically well-executed hacks, but what is most amazing to me is not the front-end combinations, but the ease in which it is possible to mix web tools in the back end to create new powerful services. And I have been especially struck by how SOAP has been utterly unnecessary for this to happen. In fact, I would argue that the strict COM-style model of SOAP is exactly the problem here, in that SOAP requires such effort and planning, it resists such freeform discovery of capabilities beyond what the creators of products imagine. REST seems to have a natural advantage here in that it builds on the inherent procedural model of HTTP and thus can evolve as naturally as websites do. Combine that with dynamic HTML tricks and we can see how nimble code can outmaneuver the heavyweight mechanics of SOAP again and again.
For a more lengthy and detailed critique of SOAP, see my earlier post, Radical Simplification
