Paul Prescod’s article on coding around Google’s SOAP API has come out.
Users of the HTTP version have no need to install a SOAP implementation like .NET’s or Apache’s. They can use any HTTP implementation, including Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Lynx, Opera, wget, java.net.URL, Python’s httplib.HTTPConnection, Perl’s LWP, etc. In fact, you could easily test the API through a plain old HTML form.
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The point that has not yet filtered through to the mainstream of web services implementors is that linking is just as important for machine-to-machine applications as it is for human-facing applications. If it is impossible to link to SOAP-exposed resources, then they are less powerful and useful than HTTP-exposed ones. Until SOAP has an addressing mechanism as rich as HTTP URIs, SOAP is less, rather than more powerful than HTTP.
Pay attention to the section where he walks through a host of examples using RDF, Xinclude, XSLT that are easy to implement using HTTP URIs.
Dave Winer, who had a Radio interface to Google’s API ready for download the day of the announcement (which made adoption easier) says:
Yes, you could do it with REST. You don’t even need XML, but since that’s what’s happening, go with the flow, let’s make new apps, and let’s enjoy this moment, instead of looking back and talking about how it could have been done.
But the point is that while it’s nice that Google parted the veil, you don’t want to foreclose an entire class of simple web applications.
