SOAP SUCKS

SOAP: Something or Other Always Off – distortedHistory in reddit.

• The S stands for Simple - A hostory lesson by Pete Lacey.
• Please drop the SOAP - Blog post by Adam Coffman.

caret_dollar in the programming subreddit wrote:

It's been five years since I started working with web services--SOAP over HTTP.
I wake up at night with a horrible vision in my head.

It's a giant, every-growing, ever-changing n-dimensional graph where every axis
is a SOAP/XML-related tool or library and each point on each axis is version of
the tool. If you tease an axis out of the graph and compare it to another axis,
you get a red/yellow/green matrix where red squares represent fatal
interactions between the tools that prevent them from working together. Yellow
squares represent interactions with limitations--e.g. the set of supported
SOAP/XML/Schema features of the two tools don't overlap so you get a limited to
a subset and anything outside the subset will cause a fatal interaction. Green
squares represent interactions that mostly work.

Red squares stop your work/project cold and require moving to a yellow/green
tool combination. Yellow squares represent many hours of puzzling through SOAP
message captures, log files, schemas and code trying to figure out why you
can't get a good reply back, or why you can drill 5 layers down into your ten
layer deep XML reply-turned-object tree but anything below that is invisible.
Or something similar and inexplicable. Green squares represent tool
interactions where things work well most of the time but fail inexplicably when
the CEOs wife is using your system or just after you leave to go on a vacation
to a place with poor or no internet service.

Navigating the graph becomes a platformer where landing on a red square means
retooling your project, landing on a yellow square sucks hours, days or weeks
out of your life troubleshooting the problem and landing on a green square just
means hard work.

Oh, and namespaces are the devil's tool.