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Comment by lfischer | Hacker News Reader

How exactly do you think REST is easier to debug and what alternatives are you comparing it to?

Crafting REST request with JSON payload is significantly easier than doing that with SOAP (or, rest it in peace, CORBA).

I don't mind a loose JSON REST-ish API, where everything is a GET, POST or (maybe) a PUT, with explicit endpoints to resolve ambiguities.

Once people start exhibiting excruciating pedantry in designing their APIs, I'll switch off somewhat.

The author was comparing REST to json-rpc. Nowhere in the article does he propose that people use SOA or CORBA.

There's no difference between debugging REST and JSON-RPC over HTTP, so there's no point to compare them. The other alternatives, that I've mentioned, are less easy to debug.

Have you ever seen SoapUI tool[1] ?

It takes just a few clicks to generate complete set of requests from WSDL (set, as in "one request per each operation"). I think it's much better user experience than hand-crafting json to use with curl.

[1] https://www.soapui.org/

That is highly dependent on the language you are using.

Many languages support auto generation of consumer and producer code based off of WSDLs.

And AFAIK, most languages that don't have the auto gen tools do have XPATH libraries for easily manipulating templated SOAP requests.

It's still much faster to run curl with JSON, than to run auto-gen tool and write a whole test program to call an API.

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