Steve: Developing on the Edge

Thoughts on development, Web-services, technology and mountains.

18Dec
Mon2006

The end of SOAP

It won't happen at once, it wont be overnight, but one day SOAP will be over. We will look back and wonder "what were we thinking". It will be up there with ActiveX, EJB2, and other things that we will describe as mistakes that should never have made it past the powerpoint stage.

At some point before SOAP is widely recognised as being over, the tide will against it. We can't see what is happening inside the enterprise, for now we can only fear that they are playing with the SOAP bits in Java 6 and .NET 3. There's probably an indirect metric of the volume of enterprise-originating support emails to SOAP and REST mail lists

What we can do is measure popularity on the big web, and the number of public endpoints. And today we have one less.

Someone at o'reilly is a bit miffed about this, showing how hard it is for everyone to recognise the support costs and opportunity costs of maintaining something that barely gets used. I can see that that the active users are upset, but well, these things happen. One day, all public SOAP endpoints will be turned off.

Incidentally, this shows a problem with relying on any external SOAP or REST service for some mission-critical role in your own code. How can you be sure that one day your service provider won't turn it off?

Slowly, all over the world, the lights on the SOAP endpoints are going out

updated. See the follow up.

Posted by steve at 22:43

Comments

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	Don't think soreply to this thread On 19 December 2006 at 12: 55 Stelios Sfakianakis commented: Unfortunately I think signifies the end of open data access than the end of SOAP. David Megginson has explained it quite well in http://www.megginson.com/blogs/quoderat/archives/2006/12/18/beginning-of-the-end-for-open-web-data-apis/ St.
	Wrong conclusion.reply to this thread On 19 December 2006 at 20: 42 David Knight commented: Doesn't seem to be a soap vs. rest thing at all. There is no REST interface to replace it. They simpy don't want to offer this service anymore. It's hard to trust anyone who whips up conclusions out of thin air.
	ActiveXreply to this thread On 21 December 2006 at 18: 01 arnaud commented: In fact ActiveX was rather a big success. It was used a lot in the Visual Basic world ("OCX controls") and I think most of today Internet Explorer plugins (like Flash or Java plugin) are ActiveX... Firefox itself uses XPCOM which is a clone of COM (the low level ActiveX foundation). On 21 December 2006 at 19: 38 Steve Loughran commented: I didnt say VBX or OCX was a bad idea, I said ActiveX. 1. We shipped production OCX controls for handling speech visualization in exchange email messages. OCX was really good for that. It let VB and (later) MFC apps add functionality in the closest we have ever got to a component reuse market. 2. ActiveX, on the other hand was the idea that by providing a URL to download code that runs outside a sandbox was a good idea. 3. I invented activeX security attacks. See http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.44.html#subj5
	I disagreereply to this thread On 22 December 2006 at 10: 57 Jeelz commented: I disagree completly.... GOOG doesn't drive the world - they are not even a platform company (atleast as of yet).