SOAP (again?)

[Richard Cameron]

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.