>SOAP and its XML schema and result is 100x more complicated than JSON. The problems outweighed the benefits.
Please mention a few of these problems, I'm curious to hear.
The problem I see with REST/JSON-APIs is that they lack features that have to be tacked on after, creating an endless bikeshedding nightmare and instead of having one well-thought out solution, you get three or four solutions sloppily hacked together. Schemas are a prime example, actually: SOAP appears to come with them out of the box, while REST/JSON-APIs either lack them (just about as bad as not having any type system in your language, i.e. really bad) or tack them on after the fact with something like OpenAPI, which is honestly not great as far as schema languages go.
Again, I say this as someone who has professionally used SOAP only once, and very briefly at that. Not advocating that we should re-adopt SOAP - I think that ship has sailed since long ago - but I really want to understand its opponents opposition to the positive qualities it appears to have.
I used it for about 3-4 years at a major telecom and a large retailer a while back.
> Schemas are a prime example, actually: SOAP appears to come with them out of the box, while REST/JSON-APIs either lack them (just about as bad as not having any type system in your language)
The problem with SOAP is that it seemed to be designed by multiple committees with different agendas. From my imperfect memory, it's not just different versions of SOAP you have to contend with, but also different variants of schema flavors. Consequently, different languages and even libraries would have implementations that might support x but not y schema feature. It was an annoying compatibility nightmare, where you needed an additional complicated tool to verify it all.
Yes, JSON/REST have their own issues, but it's nothing that good documentation can't solve, and it's supported across most if not all major programming languages. Simplicity is often very underrated.
Please mention a few of these problems, I'm curious to hear.
The problem I see with REST/JSON-APIs is that they lack features that have to be tacked on after, creating an endless bikeshedding nightmare and instead of having one well-thought out solution, you get three or four solutions sloppily hacked together. Schemas are a prime example, actually: SOAP appears to come with them out of the box, while REST/JSON-APIs either lack them (just about as bad as not having any type system in your language, i.e. really bad) or tack them on after the fact with something like OpenAPI, which is honestly not great as far as schema languages go.
Again, I say this as someone who has professionally used SOAP only once, and very briefly at that. Not advocating that we should re-adopt SOAP - I think that ship has sailed since long ago - but I really want to understand its opponents opposition to the positive qualities it appears to have.