Google's new SOAP API seemed to follow a boom-and-bust trajectory. Everyone was excited about it until it arrived. Then doubts arose. "Bah," scoffed Edd Dumbill in an O'Reilly Network column (http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/1303), "what a waste of space for something that can be done in one line of shell script." Edd's point -- that an HTML-screenscraping alternative to the Google SOAP API is easy to hack together -- is quite correct. But the conclusion -- that Google's SOAP API is silly -- is, I think, very wrong. Full story at BYTE.com .
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/04/29.html#a207