So, first up: why? Why is everything still using SOAP? I'm not talking down on Brazil, by the way. I've worked in American healthcare tech, and at some point you find yourself learning EDI to talk to insurance companies.

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chrisandchris a minute ago | parent | next [-]

> So, first up: why? Why is everything still using SOAP?

That‘s the question? And not why every single invoice has to go through the government?

I would call that developers loss of focus.

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bblb 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe it's a solved problem and SOAP 1.2 is good enough for that particular job.

We _still_ use TCP/IP and it's v4 is from 1981.

edit: I once looked deep into Remote PowerShell. How it's actually built. Dear. God. XML enveloped inside XML inside another XML wrapped around HTTP. Add some certificate based encryption for the HTTP envelope and some more encryption for the Kerberos messaging inside the serialized XML wrapped in envelopes and wrappings. Now THAT'S a communication protocol. :D

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qwertyuiop12 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

SOAP is good for flexible APIs due to xml “eats anything”, the “included” support for signatures and schema validation.

	▲	silon42 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Ironically, most XML signatures I had to use, they usually didn't schema validate.

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userbinator an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The answer is probably "because SOAP was the hot new thing when they first decided to do this".

Working with enterprise software is in general a horrific experience, especially that which originated in the 90s at the peak of OOP dogma-cults and insane architecture-astronautism abstraction mixed with SOLIDly thick levels of bureaucracy.

My memories of COM, CORBA, DCE/RPC, XML, etc. are not great. Some of the stuff reads like satire today, but people were actually serious about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Management_Group (I recall an article in a physical magazine long ago which started with "The Object Management Group's Working Task Force, also known as OMGWTF...")

	▲	beachy 35 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Sat in many meetings talking about CORBA and COM. And XML is the gift that just keeps giving. Thank god that stuff is in the rear view mirror. However in the age of AI I don't know if it matters too much that SOAP is the interchange. It is easy enough to build clients against it. It works. It's probably quite secure. Who cares?
	▲	altmanaltman 24 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> especially that which originated in the 90s at the peak of OOP dogma-cults and insane architecture-astronautism abstraction mixed with SOLIDly thick levels of bureaucracy. this is hacker poetry

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cyberax an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why it _shouldn't_ be SOAP?

It's a perfectly fine protocol, with a rigid schema and mature code generation support for all relevant languages. It's not the sexiest protocol, but it gets the job done.

And what are the alternatives? JSON schema?

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justinclift an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> mature code generation support for all relevant languages.

Heh, "relevant languages" is kind of an interesting term there. If the relevant language is Java then sure, it's fine.

Some popular modern languages (ie Go) don't have good SOAP support (yet). At least not to the point of being able to point them at WSDL/XSD specs and have everything auto-generated. :(

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ivan_gammel an hour ago | parent [-]

I think that‘s a matter of days and few hundred dollars in tokens to port it to Go if you really need it. Porting is where AI can do a really good job with the right instructions.

	▲	justinclift 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, kind of. It's more than just a few days of effort though. Sme of the members of my team at work have been working on adding SOAP 1.1 support. It's a significant amount of time and effort though.

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coredev_ an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think the biggest problems with SOAP was the implementations, never the standard. WCF...

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userbinator an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And what are the alternatives? JSON schema?

ASN.1? It's even more mature, and the de-facto DER/BER encoding is far more efficient to generate and parse than anything XML-based.

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anticensor an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

An adaptation of PEPPOL (also XML, but at least standardised)?

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clhodapp an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It's based on XML and XML is a cursed format, because it does not cleanly separate parsing from evaluation. Because of this flaw, whatever words they want to use, it does not have real schemas, it has programs and a validator-evaluator, which performs network IO.

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toast0 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

SOAP is terrible[1], but if the whole country is on board, change is very difficult and you're not going to move to anything simpler because it would either be too simple to actually satisfy the need or too simple to satisfy the selection comittee.

[1] The whole thing with wsdl is like an elaborate prank. Without fail, the WSDL files are impossible to obtain and don't reflect the service as deployed or documented. Documented equivalent forms will not be treated as equivalent. Two instances of a 'standard' service will not accept the same XML. And I only worked with simple SOAP services with straight forward payloads.

	▲	doc_ick 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Unfortunately that seems like bad history. I’ve only had good experience with wsdls, internally and externally, but they were generated with the services and readily available.