Wagnerblog

Comment from Dan
Time June 26, 2007 at 5:19 am

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Web services for internal applications exposed as something other than SOAP and wondered why the creators of those apps chose to re-invent the wheel. What you’re saying validates my experiences working on either end of a standards (SOAP) based Web service, and it’s easy to see why people get frustrated with it.

One of my clients, a large lending organization who shall remain nameless, invented their own XML protocol for this purpose–it’s beautiful, works very nicely, and makes use of other standards and best practices even if it eschews a standard communication protocol like SOAP. I don’t know for sure if this was done as a result of running into similar frustrations with SOAP “dialects”, particularly given that applications within this organization run on a variety of platforms; but the fact that an established and well-known standard was purposely ignored by folks who are pretty dang smart, not to mention sensitive to being exposed for overlooking any kind of standard or best practice, says a lot.

You have to wonder whether the fuzziness of current Web Services and all the resulting “dialects” is a consequence of Microsoft driving it one direction (semi-proprietary) and the rest of the industry trying to drive it another direction (truly open).

Comment from Thomas
Time June 26, 2007 at 7:34 am

Yes especially in the case of MS, its hard to gauge the impact of the datasets thrown in the mix. Most devs I have worked with make a conscious effort to stay away from them for serialization. But there was some time lost while everyone was trying to figure out what the heck MS was doing and why web services the way they were originally shown by MS would not work properly in a heterogeneous setting.

Pingback from wagnerblog.com » HTNG Certification
Time June 27, 2007 at 3:15 pm

[...] this is quite wonderful news. I briefly blogged about the experience of coding against HTNG over here.  Congratulations NxTV [...]