Slashdot Log In
Google Deprecates SOAP API
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Dec 19, 2006 10:28 PM
from the washed-up dept.
from the washed-up dept.
Michi writes "Brady Forrest at O'Reilly Radar reports that Google has deprecated their SOAP API; they aren't giving out any new SOAP Search API keys. Nelson Minar (the original author of the Google SOAP API) argues that this move is motivated by business reasons rather than technical ones. Does this mark the beginning of the end for SOAP or for ubiquitous middleware in general?" Forrest's post quotes developer Paul Bausch: "This is such a bad move because the Google API was the canonical example of how web services work. Not only is Google Hacks based on this API, but hundreds of other books and online examples use the Google API to show how to incorporate content from another site into a 3rd party application."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Honeymoon is Over? (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA:
Just as I suspected: SOAP suffers from an artificial (read: gratuitous) complexity; what more do you need besides XML-RPC, anyway?
Google quietly shutting down services, on the other hand, reminds me of differentiating stem-cells: the honeymoon is over.
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:5, Insightful)
Without a Next-Next-Finish wizard, SOAP is a pain. With the tool it's mildly uncomfortable.
Parent
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think it's so much that companies don't want to as it is that there is no money in it.
If Amazon provided an API for buying stuff, I think it would stick around
If eBay provided an API for listing / searching, I think it would stick around.
Google, however, provides their product strictly for advertising revenue...it's wayyyy too easy for a consumer of the content to filter out the thing Google makes their money from.
It's very similar to the problem with Tivo's (PVR's) and commercial television. Luckily in that case, the television providers don't make their money directly from advertising revenue...
Parent
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:5, Informative)
http://developer.ebay.com/common/api/ [ebay.com]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> Companies don't want to make their data and services available to each other.
But people do. Why does everything we do have to be dictated by what a company would do? There are ways to achieve things in life other than to wait for a company to do it.
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, I beg the differ, please bear with me.
SOAP is based on an idea of giving APIs to external parties for accessing information the way the information-owners want it. SOAP might be bad, but the idea is sound. Thinking about the traditional and dirty way to do the same thing: write scripts to 'post' webpages and extract the return pages. You can imagine slight changes in webpage layout could render the original extraction scripts useless, and that kind of information extraction might not be the owners' desire.
In short, things SHOULD be done this way, but Google doesn't like this implementation(SOAP). Google might want to adopt other implementation, that's what we'd like to know.
Parent
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Another case: I cannot name a single well-designed W3C spec that was consortium-driven, and cannot name a single consortium-driven W3C spec that was well-designed.)
Web service standards cannot be driven by the very people who profit most from non-standard solutions. Even when they are designed well, they will STILL carry unacceptable flaws precisely because they are not driven by a collective itch but by a desire to stop someone else's scratch being the one that's used. The day a truly open federation of user-developers (you need a group of people where each person is both user AND developer) who have no ulterior motive beyond solving the service issue is formed will be the day that you see a protocol that requires no "perfect case study", proprietary extensions, overweight IDEs, etc. It will just work and be just used. Same as every other system developed that way has always just worked and just been used.
Parent
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:5, Interesting)
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>namespace.getCountryCodeFromAbbr</met
<params>
<param>
<value><string>UK</string></value>
</param>
</params>
</methodCall>
Browsers already have Javascript engines in that take C-syntaxey looking ascii and convert it into functions and objects, so why not just use a C-syntaxey plaintext to describe the service?
read: namespace{ int getCountryCodeFromAbbr( string ); };
send: namespace.getCountryCodeFromAbbr( "UK" );
get : 44
now, ok you might want to send comlext data structures back, but hey, you can just slap in the curly braces and be done
read: namespace{ personStruct{ string name, int age, char sex }; personStruct getPersonFromUserId( int ); };
send: namespace.getPersonFromUserId( 12 );
get : { "John Smith", 34, 'M' };
oh, but i forget: everthing has to be XML to be enterprisey, wether or not it's the best tool for the job, or if there's already a tool for the job that can do it for you with just a little tiny bit of effort. The "include this
Parent
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:5, Interesting)
In my opinion, at this point it's just a mess, and for anything beyond the complexity of the stock-quote example I look to other technologies. I, for one, shed no tears at the end of this honeymoon.
(And am I the only one that cringes at using SOAP messages (or XML in general) for something that's supposed to be a machine-to-machine interaction? If you're going to write a new standard, why not write something more efficient?
Parent
Google = Hypocritcal (Score:3, Interesting)
Which makes Google one hell of a hypocritical company. This is a company that couldn't exist if it wasn't for content put out there by other businesses and individuals yet when it comes to sharing
You have it backwards i.e. Google != Hypocritcal (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Power of SOAP (Score:4, Informative)
The real power of SOAP comes when you are using a language or framework that has support for it builtin. SOAP is complex simply because it does more than XML-RPC with type handling etc.
In PHP you can use NuSOAP (or in 5.x the built-in SOAP library), to simply register some functions and autogenerate the WSDL, or generate a proxy from a given WSDL - takes a couple of minutes tops and then looks like you are simply calling another function.
Anyone who uses ASP.NET regularly has it even better - create an ASMX file, define a class and functions like you would in any C# class, add some namespace arguments, a [WebMethod] over all your public methods and it can then be instantiated and called from any other ASP.NET website or .NET dekstop app seamlessly, like it was a local class. It's really cool just how transparent it all is. You can even throw exceptions and catch them on the other side, pass back objects - it's really slick.
Parent
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dave
Parent
bastards (Score:5, Funny)
Re:bastards (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Well it was 'just' a Beta (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well it was 'just' a Beta (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_produ
Parent
What about XMLRPC? (Score:5, Informative)
If so, then I'd say it's fine to drop SOAP. XMLRPC is a bit cleaner anyways.
Re:What about XMLRPC? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a client-side lib. What if you want to make the call from a server?
Re:What about XMLRPC? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Oh! Come On. (Score:4, Funny)
Come on... Cleaner than SOAP? What could be cleaner than SOAP?
Parent
Re:What about XMLRPC? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Soap, what was that? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe something to do with:
UNIX Sex
{look;gawk;find;sed;talk;grep;touch;finger;find;fl ex;unzip;head;tail;
mount;workbone;fsck;yes;gasp;fsck;more;yes;yes;eje ct;umount;makeclean;
zip;split;done;exit:xargs!!;)}
Re:Soap, what was that? (Score:5, Funny)
So is that why nerds are getting acused of rape? (Not checking return codes...)
The semicolons should be double ampersands, so that execution will stop if a command fails.
Parent
Re:Soap, what was that? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but in the guy's defense, there wasn't a single argument to any of those commands.
Parent
Re:Soap, what was that? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Soap, what was that? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Don't be evil! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Don't be evil! (Score:4, Funny)
Um... seriously though. Give them a bit of time and see if the make and announcement and publish an alternative (non-AJAX) API.
Parent
Re:Don't be evil! (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Google provides you a wide range of services, which you value, at aboslutely no cost to yourself.
?
*boggle*
So did you just need to take a break from bashing the Salvation Army, or what?
Uncleanliness is next to Satanliness (Score:5, Funny)
(SOAP is a WS) != (WS is SOAP) (Score:3, Insightful)
Google branding? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Google branding? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, since Google is the one who aggregated it in the first place... and is paying for the processing power and bandwidth requirements that go along with that... what's unfair about the practice? (It's not like they're really preventing one from giving you similar data, or somehow stealing away value from any of the sites they've indexed, or...)
Parent
loss, opportunity, lesson or deja-vu? (Score:4, Insightful)
Their responsibility is more towards their shareholders, not so much towards their users. So, if they think one of their products -- be that APIs, ajax apps or whatever are providing diminishing returns for some reason, they'll axe it unless it is popular enough so that too many users feel ripped off. APIs aren't in the category at all.
Also, the bigger they get, the more expensive the stock becomes, and the more their ownership sreads, the more clout the bean counters have over any other management ideology.
So, if one relies exclusively to Google for anything, better check your contract with Google carefully and assess all risks (including risk from expensive litigation) first.
So Google is starting to act like a real business? (Score:4, Interesting)
Say it ain't so!
It would be interesting to know how many active API users there were, and at what rate new ones were signing up, if at all. It may well be that continuing to support that API wasn't considered a useful (read: profitable) part of their business.
Google is a publicly held corporation now. They have a responsibility to their shareholders to make decisions based on sound business practices. For a software company that means sending products into the end-of-life bin periodically.
In a fabulous dose of irony, I found that on Google's AJAX Search API page [google.com], their own embedded search example is showing a blog posting titled "Google quietly backrooms SOAP API for AJAX".
Screenshot here [davidmays.com] (Yeah, I'm using IE7, wannafightaboutit?)
That's unfortunate (Score:5, Interesting)
And the replacement (Score:3, Informative)
Not that Google Search API has ever been very stable - it probably works only 80% of the time. Now even the support has been dropped and usage samples along with FAQ have been removed for SOAP api.
Obligatory questions/puns (Score:4, Funny)
No SOAP, Radio (Score:5, Interesting)
Google is replacing SOAP with an AJAX API. Maybe it is a blow to SOAP - which is long overdue for the 1990s graveyard. But how could that be bad for open-access middleware when there's a new, better API?
Drop-In Replacement Already Available (Score:5, Informative)
Good riddance. (Score:4, Informative)
This isn't google being evil. This is google removing a piece of completely unnecessary junk from their offerings. SOAP should never have seen the light of day, and google is now making sure that they do their part of burying it.
Of course they dropped it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that Google want to run their business off the back of ad revenues, it should come as no surprise they're getting rid of services that don't allow them to sell lots and lots of ads. I also imagine that the cost of providing the SOAP interface was higher than any subscription fees would have brought in due to a small market. What's more, it would directly help their competitors pull in results from Google and run their own ads alongside it. The API was neat, but from a business perspective it was always an experiment at best.
Personally, I'd rather they brought something RESTful like Yahoo's interface or xml-rpc to the table, and charged us all a couple of cents per 100 queries, but that isn't going to happen any time soon.
Re:WTF is SOAP? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:WTF is SOAP? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent