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SOAP's work/reward ratio

Kevin Altis is collecting WSDL verifiers and SOAP endpoint invokers. "Quite frankly," he says, "using SOAP and WSDL feels like work."

That's partly due to the tools-and-interop situation, which as Kevin notes, is rapidly improving. Mainly, though, it just is a lot of work to deploy all this machinery in order to call yet another stock-quote or celsius-to-fahrenheit gizmo that returns one lonely little value swaddled in layers of XML. It's not just tools-and-interop holding back the flood of interesting services that we all envision. What makes services interesting is data that's interesting. Some creators/gatherers of interesting data will wrap high-quality APIs around it just for fun. But for others, maybe most others, it'll have to be a business.


Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/02/12.html#a58