Zaheer Abbas Merali

All this debate on Planet Gnome about SOAP and REST…I am going to throw my 2 cents.

At work, I am developing a pretty extensive browser based system to run the day to day affairs of the business. I am doing this in Ruby on Rails. Rails has a lovely easy way of creating web services in SOAP/XML RPC.

This is great, until you realise that your customers’ php web sites have issues with any kind of complex parameter or return value. This happens with both Pear-SOAP and with PHP 5’s integrated SOAP library.

I am sure php is not alone here, and that the same issues are apparent in other languages. Web services are meant for all to grok, and SOAP is lets face it much more of a pain to debug than simple XML that REST advocates. Most langauges have pretty stable and easy to use XML parsers and everyone knows how to generate and parse XML. This simplicity is a big win for REST.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 27th, 2005 at 4:46 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.