Dare left something out (and it's important)

Sunday, August 17, 2008 by Dave Winer.

I'm in the middle of a complex project or I'd take more time out to explain, but Dare Obasanjo left out the one thing in the history of SOAP vs REST that guys like him always leave out. I don't know why they do it, because it's the most important bit, it's the point between the complexity of SOAP as it evolved through the interests of the BigCos and the incompleteness of REST.  

It's called XML-RPC and it's what SOAP was before the BigCo's made it complex. 

Really ought to include it in your thinking, Dare and everyone else. You're missing out on something that works really well. You should at least learn the lessons and add to REST what it needs to catch up with XML-RPC. Seriously. 

What's missing in REST, btw, is a standard method of serializing structs, lists and scalar types. The languages we use have a lot more in common than you might think. We're all writing code, again and again, every time we support a new interface that could be written once and then baked into the kernels of our languages, and then our operating systems. Apple actually did this with Mac OS, XML-RPC support is baked in. So did Python. So if you think it's just me saying this, you should take another look.