I have read a couple blog posts regarding the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State Transfer (REST). Let me start by talking about and InfoWorld article. It discusses a statement by Tim Bray, the director of technologies at Sun Microsystems. He says the “SOAP stack is a failure”. Tim continues that REST is more viable, elegant, and affordable. He says there will be more and more tools for REST from big companies such as Sun, Microsoft, and Oracle. However Tim concedes that there is a lack of current tools for REST.Another good blog post was “REST as an engineering discipline” by Bill de hOra. Bill comes out and says that SOAP is simple. After all the S in SOAP stands for simple. He contrasts this with REST which is not necessarily simple. Bill qualifies this by saying that REST is neither better nor worse than SOAP. He does state that REST works. But he advises that REST is not for hackers. And there is a lot of hype around rest right now. Things may be a lot different once the hype dies down.
Having done a little SOAP with a lot of help from instructional materials, I can say that it is indeed not all that simple. Yes the outer wrapper of the SOAP envelope may not be rocket science. But from a beginner’s standpoint, you have enough to worry about with XML. Adding the SOAP layer on top for messaging does introduce a little more complexity. Perhaps this will get easier if I work with SOAP more often. For now my project only intends to receive input files in XML format. I am not sure if they shall be validated with an XML schema, or be packed in a SOAP envelope. It is just exciting that the topics I have learned about and will be using are current ones in the technology sector.
