Hacker News Reader

Comment by edejong | Hacker News Reader

Really? I made one yesterday based on a WSDL from a customer. The whole API was auto generated in type safe Scala in seconds. After adding authentication configuration and some sensible timeouts, I had the whole thing running in two hours. The SOAPui auto generated a mock test and load tests with which I could mimic specific weird responses.

The REST API I had to forward through however had no good documentation, no client library, so I was forced to write json serializers and reverse engineer the code. Overall, when you have a well written SOAP interface (rare, admitted), development time can be greatly reduced.

View on HN

In order to get the well written SOAP interface, it helps to have the right tools and be used to using them. I think that increases the barrier to entry on using SOAP, which leads to the idea that SOAP is terrible and crufty compared to REST.

I learned SOAP relatively recently, but well after it was a fad. Today, my experience would be like yours if I had to make a SOAP service with just a WSDL. But when I started out? It would take a longer for me to wrap my head around all of it. I can't imagine how confusing it would be if I had to do it all without the benefit of working on a team whose focus is a SOAP-based product. I dunno if I would know where to begin.

Compare that to REST. Even if you know next-to-nothing to start, you can do a basic REST tutorial for just about any stack in an hour, and get a basic implementation of an API up in an afternoon.

Did you really just complain that REST is bad because you couldn't find an auto-generation tool to do your work for you? Because that's hilarious.

Also, you don't seem to have looked terribly hard, because there are a few really powerful tools out there for autogenerating server and client code for REST APIs, as well as mock servers and a whole host of other tooling (See: Swagger, RAML, API Blueprint for starting points).

I wonder how you arrive at your conclusions. It's rather hilarious, to be honest. I've found that good machine readable specifications of rest interfaces are as rare as well designed SOAP interfaces.

I've used a variety of tools to generate and test REST interfaces in the last ten years. To a mixed success, I must say.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com