Ruby on Rails And Soap Hell

To Whomever decided that WSDLs and SOAP should be the Enterprise communication standard,

I should murder you, slowly.....

--Robert R. Meyer


Really? Really!? WSDLs? Come on man. Your killing me here.

One of the WSDLs that I have to support, which we actually inherited from another product, is full of duplications and includes three calls to the same underlying function with optional parameters the only distinguishing feature to separate each of the calls.

The WSDL is 640 lines for a few methods. This strikes me as insane. The best part is that there is nothing DRY about WSDLs. They are by nature the most disgusting blend of XML and .... well something more disgusting... like badly written sudo OO PHP?

The primary issue I have with SOAP is that so many of our consumers use SOAP as their API of choice. I hate this, the definition language, while verbose, is inelegant. There is far too much bolier plate code required to even begin to use the API. Entire commercial solutions exist in order to elieviate this issue. In my experience and opinion, this usually denotes a problem.

Solutions like SoapUI and a few others are designed to generate the required boiler plate code to start using SOAP. Anyone looking at the generated code should realize that two thousand lines of java should not be required to request a list from your data provider. REST is much better in this regard.

One of our primary product's WSDL definition requires 271 lines of java just to use the document upload call. Bit exessive? I would say so.

After spending around four hours working on creating a new, simpler WSDL to expose document upload and meta-tagging, it is time to go home. All I can see is indented xml fragments with custom namespaces defined wherever the origonal creater determined it was best.

Headache? Check.
Code Blind? Check.
Mentally Drained? Check.

Time to go get a beer.