Re: modern ways of doing web services

[Your Mother]

Honey, that SOAP was ruined when you took it out of the RFC.

Perhaps our link-shotgunning anonymous monk will pepper you with REST links. If not, I’ll update with a few in a bit.

Update, few hours later…

Since SOAP is a protocol and REST is a set of architectural ideas/guides they’re not exactly swappable… still.

OpEd

I don’t have the space to explain all the problems [with SOAP] right now … but they boil down to massive interoperability problems. Good lord, you can’t even pass a number between languages reliably, much less arrays, or dates, or structures that can be null, or… It just doesn’t work. It’s not such a problem if you’re writing both the client and the server. But if you’re publishing a server for others to use? Forget it.

The deeper problem with SOAP is strong typing … [it] is a bad choice for loosely coupled distributed systems. The moment you need to change anything, the type signature changes and all the clients that were built to your earlier protocol spec break. And I don’t just mean major semantic changes break things, but cosmetic things like accepting a 64 bit int where you used to only accept 32 bit ints, or making a parameter optional. SOAP, in practice, is incredibly brittle. If you’re building a web service for the world to use, you need to make it flexible and loose and a bit sloppy. Strong typing is the wrong choice. –Why SOAP sucks

Also: SOAP vs REST, tl;dr —> the answer is almost always REST.

Reading

• google: perlmonks rest webservice
• google: rest AND ( catalyst OR mojolicious OR dancer OR amon2 )

Some relevant kits

No reviews, no endorsements

• Catalyst::Controller::REST
• Mojolicious::Guides::Routing
• Dancer2::Plugin::REST
• Amon2

Routing grab bag

• Path::Router
• HTTP::Router
• Path::Dispatcher
• Forward::Routes
• Routes::Tiny
• Web::Dispatcher::Simple
• Kelp::Routes
• CatalystX::Routes
• Scaffold::Routes
• DancerX::Routes
• Mojolicious::Routes
• REST::Application::Routes
• Path::Router
• Router::Simple
• Amon2::Web::Dispatcher::RouterSimple
• Flea

I wanted to code up a micro-example but ran out of time today. The router stuff is fun and micro-apps with Plack is too so I might revisit this one of these days with a new post.