[capidl] Re: [E-Lang] Concerning XML docs

[Zooko]

[Sorry if this is inappropriate for e-lang.  Please let me know.]

 Ben Laurie wrote:
>
> "Jonathan S. Shapiro" wrote:
> > 2. If it becomes useful to do RPC exchange with XML-based applications,
> > XML-RPC may become an important de-facto exchange standard.
> 
> Can we say SOAP?

Actually the word I hear from various open source hackers (e.g. advogato.org)
and from my little brother who implemented both XML-RPC and SOAP interfaces for
Mojo Nation is that SOAP provides too many features, some of which are
unneeded, that the spec is still too unstable.  It may be a case of the
simpler, dumber, earlier solution beating out the technically improved one.
(E.g. the way that C is still preferred over C++ by most open source hackers.)

Or it may not.  Perhaps SOAP will mature quickly and perhaps the industry
support for SOAP will carry some weight.

But for, e.g. my upcoming Mojo Nation API [1], which is aimed more at open
source hackers than at buzzword-compliant industrial policymakers, we are
definitely using XML-RPC instead of SOAP.  (And, actually we are also providing
a C API front-end that does RPC to the backend over XML-RPC.  My guess is that
the C API front-end will prove more popular than the actual SOAP protocol...)

Regards,

Zooko

[1] rough draft:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/~checkout~/mojonation/evil/hackerdocs/LJ_article.html?content-type=text/html