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
Some relevant kits
No reviews, no endorsements
Routing grab bag
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.
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