SOAP (again?)
Richard Cameron
camster@REDACTED
Fri Dec 23 16:55:47 CET 2005
On 23 Dec 2005, at 14:40, Dmitrii Dimandt wrote:
> Yeah. And then there's Microsoft's s:any which isn't parsed by either
> Apache Axis or gSOAP
And that, actually, is why I've just spent the whole morning hand-
editing a .wsdl file to try to coax gSOAP into being able to talk
this simple, platform independent, open protocol.
Although this has remarkably little to do with Erlang (I primarily
want to moan about the state of the world to anyone who'll listen),
there is the observation that I constantly find myself able to
implement most (non-XML) protocols in Erlang remarkably easily by
using a combination of bit syntax and writing little finite state
machines.
In general, dealing with things which would be very scary for Java
and C# programmers (low level bit twiddly stuff, or texty protocols
like HTTP or SMTP) always turns out to be remarkably easy in Erlang.
Unfortunately the flip-side of that is also true: communicating over
"industry standard" protocols like SOAP (which Java/C# programmers
are forced to use because there's no sane alternative) always turns
out to be a real pain in Erlang. I don't think that's because it's
technically more difficult to implement a SOAP client in Erlang, it's
just because there's usually a nicer/easier way to do it so nobody's
really been inclined to build the XML tools that the Java and
Microsoft boys have.
Richard.
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