SOAP
by havoc
Miguel,
that’s cool, I know SOAP (with a library) doesn’t involve a ton of
application code. My point is more that (to me) it’s just not worth
learning about for this sort of thing. If you want to get a couple of
pieces of data on an Amazon product you just do “get url contents” and
“stuff into XML parser” and “grab the Item node” and that’s about
it. All programmers already know how to download a URL and pull out an
XML node, and being able to try out requests in the browser by editing
the address in the location bar is pretty useful. “REST” is
just very conceptually simple and requires no ramp-up time, even if it
involves a couple more lines of code. But if you already know SOAP and
have the library sitting there, by all means it makes sense to use it.
According to this Tim
O’Reilly article the real percentage was 85% of Amazon usage is
REST, 15% SOAP – just to set the record straight vs. the 1%
I had misremembered.
For this particular task the transport protocol hardly matters; as
you say the time is all in registering for the account and so
forth. On that front Amazon via any protocol is way, way better than
eBay via any protocol, I assure you!
i.e. the actual API and service design are much more important than how
one gets the bits from point A to point B.
(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005-11.html#26.3)