Google Deprecates SOAP API 240
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."
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.
Well it was 'just' a Beta (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:5, Insightful)
Without a Next-Next-Finish wizard, SOAP is a pain. With the tool it's mildly uncomfortable.
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dave
(SOAP is a WS) != (WS is SOAP) (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re:What about XMLRPC? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a client-side lib. What if you want to make the call from a server?
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (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.
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.
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...)
Re:Don't be evil! (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?
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.
Re:You have it backwards i.e. Google != Hypocritca (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
No money in it... Exactly. But there is a way (Score:3, Insightful)
But that is key and I hope Google understands this: The risk is from unrestricted access.
It is somewhat easy to implement XML security and provide approved businesses with what amounts to an access token. They could also allow developers a limited number of queries per day in the same manner. Such a system would allow Google to allow approved uses of their API (e.g. tools that display their ads or relationships with approved business deals behind them).
Simply letting this wonderful access point into their search engine die would be a grand shame.
Re:Straw Man (Score:3, Insightful)
Wild idea: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:2, Insightful)
In your exemple that would be something like And that's it, it cannot be easier than that. Search on the web there are several such libraries available for different languages. If you use a compiled language like C++ you can also compile the WSDL in advance to a proxy.cc/proxy.h client wrapper, much as with an IDL compiler. But in a language like javascript it is better to create the proxy dynamically, and you can also use introspection to discover which methods are available for exemple.
Re:No SOAP, Radio (Score:3, Insightful)
Tooling is the wrong solution to SOAP (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a solution to a problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place.
It reminds me of a SOAP is simple conversation [wanderingbarque.com], which explains quite well how SOAP evolved.
Writing a complex specification makes it hard for other parties to create compatible applications. Just like everybody needs *the one true browser* to navigate arround the Internet, everyone needs tools for SOAP. A simple spec would make SOAP extremely powerful, but also sets developers free of certain (commercially available) tools they need now...
In result, this is what SOAP gives us now:
There is one positive feature I can add. Things like REST have very random return values, SOAP is more consistent here.
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:3, Insightful)
That one of the very few cases where XML does make sense. If you look better at that , all you can take out of it is syntax sugar, no intrisical complexity (you just replace a mess of tags with a mess of braces). That at the cost of implementing another parser that will often be full of bugs.
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:3, Insightful)
With JavaScript most stuff is done with JSON now anyway, so your arguments don't really apply.
Re:Honeymoon is Over? (Score:5, Insightful)
SOAP technology sucks, too (Score:3, Insightful)