Hacker News Reader

Comment by ci5er | Hacker News Reader

Sort of, yeah. It strikes me as an inflexible IDL that had out-of-wedlock children with an incompletely specified ASN.1. That said - they're working with JSON/HTTP "REST-like", so there's only so much anyone could do on either front... Anything to formalize a spec and enable some better automated tooling would be a good thing, no?

That reminds me -- whatever happened to WS-* (and in particular WSDL and SOAP)? Did that just wander off into the forest and die, or are people still using that? If they are, I'd assume it's in some of the enterprise-ey verticals?

View on HN

SOAP and friends are still deeply entrenched in various "enterprise" settings (IBM and Oracle seem to still be on that bandwagon), but it's a long time since that stuff peaked. It's definitely legacy tech.

A few years ago I had to use some public API offered by the Norwegian government through a private-sector partner [1]. Looks like they're still completely SOAP/WSDL-based even today. (At the time I just needed to use a single endpoint, so I ended up just doing everything as plain XML, instead of generating an RPC client from WSDL; so much easier. Ugh, I'm glad I don't work for a company that is heavily invested in that crap.)

I can't imagine anyone sane would do a greenfield project today using any of it.

[1] http://ws.infotorg.no/

It's being used in large-scale projects because it can be used in tenders. Do you want government shell out your tax money for the latest JS fad instead? Imagine the outcry something goes south in such a project.

I agree though that XML is overkill for describing payloads in most RPC scenarios. XML is for describing semistructured data rather than co-inductive data structures (arrays, records, etc.). JSON shines here precisely because it doesn't need a schema to be useful.

However, once you have a need to communicate your API to others, or to develop in a large project/waterfall model, schemaless doesn't cut it. JSON Schema is doing it wrong IMHO. I think that since JSON is basically the object literal syntax of JavaScript, an RPC mechanism could use a JavaScript subset as IDL, in the style of "Logic Programs as Types of Logic Programs" ([1]).

Note that WSDL can describe REST-like and other HTTP-based protocols, not just SOAP.

[1]: http://www.informatik.uni-ulm.de/pm/fileadmin/pm/home/fruehw...

Sure people are still using it. Nothing ever dies in the technology world. People are still using COBOL, Fortran, MVS, OS/400, AIX, Irix, etc. too. But it's clearly not "hip" anymore, which means that any comment on the matter here on HN will invariably be negative. Well, almost any.

There's this weird dichotomy in tech: we're heavily fad-driven and obsessed with the latest, newest, cool, hip "stuff" on one hand, but on the other hand, no old tech ever really dies. Or at least, it take a LONG time to completely die.

So basically, any tech more than about 4 years old is in this weird zombie state where it isn't dead, but isn't "what the cool kids use" anymore.

This. For the last month I've been working on a big enterprise Flash flex application that talks to a PHP backend.

It seems that flex mxml is a good idea, but once apple decided to kill flash, the developer community jumped ship. Thankfully adobe gave flex to apache, and a small community lives on.

The interesting opportunity seems to be that there remain quite a few good consulting opportunities for flex devs.

The employers are getting a little anxious about finding devs and many are willing to work with you no matter your time zone :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com