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Comment by acqbu | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone else click on the link expecting a rant about the soap protocol?

I clicked on it expecting effusive praise of SOAP. Disappointed to find it's still only me, there must be tens of us who like it.

Poor dear. I think they have medication for that...

I have done ONVIF programming, and I actually licensed a dependency for the SOAP part.

Are you talking about 'soap' the tv series? That fucker took me years to understand, but when i finally did get it, Barney Miller suddenly made a lot more sense. Especially that one-eyed green guy.

My company has been scaling its way into the realm where the use-cases for things like workload managers and enterprise service busses are just starting to make sense to me. Can you ELI5 the (presumably very enterprise-y) niche where SOAP really shines, above-and-beyond just building regular REST APIs with OpenAPI schemas?

I'll be honest I've never really considered the various drawbacks and benefits against other solutions. It's just something I occasionally run into in a legacy context where I need to integrate to get unblocked.

I think not having used it to any real extent I've not run into the parts people hate. I just get an automatically generated client library that can be treated like normal method calls, more or less.

But I've also not had the opportunity to work with OpenAPI stuff so I'm not sure what the current state of the art there looks like

I have heard praise of SOAP once. It came from a Sun spokesperson, before the protocol had support on anything on the real world.

I have never heard praise of it again.

To tell you the truth, the autodiscovery part would be really awesome... if it worked. But instead, the thousands of pages long set of standards that create SOAP are not specific enough, so it doesn't work.

Yes.

Only tangentially related: does anyone else have the sense that GraphQL is fancy, modern SOAP?

Oh no, I love me some graphql, soap on the other hand was like my worst interop nightmare.

The S stands for Simple: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/soap/simple

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