I spent several years integrating Java/Linux/Unix/Microsoft/etc and I never ceased to be amazed at how many companies/programmers thought it required different code to make them interoperable. I had very few issues with SOAP interaction between systems because they are just text files.
For all intents and purposes, SOAP is a formatted pipe connection. The only issues I ever ran into were related to things like Java incorrectly implementing RSA encryption or Microsoft adding so much complexity that nobody used (and did not require).
There are still several major banks/insurance companies out there whose payroll transaction systems run on the SOAP implementations I put in place 10 or more years ago.
Now I see people claiming REST is better (and in many ways, they are correct), but I also see that large numbers of programmers don't really grasp REST any better than they did SOAP.
> I had very few issues with SOAP interaction between systems because they are just text files.
Did you write parsers for the messages by hand every time?
I did a bit of work with SOAP, and found interoperability to be a problem. Encapsulation and signatures both spring to mind. But then, i was using tooling on both sides. I shudder to think what dealing with SOAP messages manually would have been like.
Why would I write manual parsing code every time? There already are/were XML parsers in every language I needed to integrate. SOAP is just XML. XML is easy. I've moved to REST implementations but I have just quite got why anyone thought SOAP itself was anything complicated.
Microsoft's 'WS' implementations were a mess of SOAP, but that's a whole different story.
For all intents and purposes, SOAP is a formatted pipe connection. The only issues I ever ran into were related to things like Java incorrectly implementing RSA encryption or Microsoft adding so much complexity that nobody used (and did not require).
There are still several major banks/insurance companies out there whose payroll transaction systems run on the SOAP implementations I put in place 10 or more years ago.
Now I see people claiming REST is better (and in many ways, they are correct), but I also see that large numbers of programmers don't really grasp REST any better than they did SOAP.