SOAP frustrations

[Christopher Browne]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Andrew Dalke <adalke at mindspring.com> wrote:
> I know little about "SOAP concepts."  I want to do RPC.  I want
> a list of arguments and I want to return a simple data structure.
> I asked about XML-RPC.  No one said they wanted to run an XML-RPC
> client if SOAP is functionally equivalent.  No one mentioned any
> other API besides SOAP they wanted to use.  Yes, I could also
> consider CORBA and DCOM, but I don't know how to layer those on
> top of a web server, so setting up a new server would call for more
> complicated administration.

If you want to do RPC, I'd suggest that XML-RPC probably /is/ a better
option than SOAP.

- XML-RPC is much simpler than SOAP.

- You can "stack" RPC requests together into one request, with the
  result that, with a little planning, it can be /fabulously/ more
  efficient than SOAP.

- There are much more mature and complete implementations of XML-RPC
  for Python than there are SOAP implementations.

- There more than likely never will be a "mature and complete" SOAP
  implementation for Python because the express intent of SOAP is
  to provide a framework for great gobs of "layered standards," many
  of which likely require pretty proprietary stuff that likely won't
  get provided in Python.  (Think:  VeriSign crypto tools that you
  /must/ get from VeriSign that they only deploy in Java.)

There are decent XML-RPC implementations everywhere; they're merely
"less buzzword compliant" because the big marketing organizations
(IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, Sun, ...) are much more interested in
getting you to pay $20K a pop for the software licenses required for
their full scale SOAP environments...  (I'm making up the $20K figure.
So sue me.)
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You should talk to the DOCTOR.