I tried SOAP for the first time today. It wasn't bad. I had a client for the service built automatically instead of writing my own.

Why is SOAP dead?

Because people work at home and stopped taking baths.

Because it's slow, painful to maintain, and you send a bucket load of more data per request then it's json counter part.

Some receivers struggle with with whitespace and characters like & which need to be & 🤷‍♂️

But.... despite it's pain, once you get it working for for a service, it's usually set and forgot.

I've found SOAP based apis to be well documented though vs REST APis - but that could be just me 😅

You were lucky.

Depending on what type of WSDL your soap service has, and what language you're trying to develop a client in, it can be anywhere from trivial to damn near impossible to automatically build a client. And even when you can, WSDL is often automatically generated in a way that makes no sense rather than written manually, so you need a wrapper round your auto generated client anyway.

Plus, when you then come to upgrade the API, you have to generate a whole new client, which may or may not work.

Add to that a whole bunch of other complaints like it's difficult to unit test, slow, horrendously inefficient, difficult to read and debug manually, etc. and Im very glad it's mostly dead.

Try using a soap service that doesn't publish it's WSDL to you. You'll pull your hair out and curse at it.

Soap alone is hardly specific - Soap 1.0... Soap 1.2... which WSDL spec?

Soap is a mess. If it works, good.

As long as the client stays the same. Client changes and you're dead.

(Had the joy multiple times long ago. Some clients don't like X, others require X -t's fun)

@IntrusionCM this reminds me of services using node elements to seperate data, vs, using attributes in a single element, actually I have one currently that receives in node per data, but responds in attributes... coz fuck the world!

@C0D4 that's a good representation of why I don't like XML as a data format.

Body wash > soap

My old job had several SOAP-APIs. The code was basically a legacy cluster fuck. Adding a new field took hours to get right and then you had to manually find and delete these fucking WSDL-cache files on test + production.
No documentation (or automation), so it was up to me: I added a new field for a json-payload, documented it and rejoiced. It was magical: no xml-fuckery, no cache, no try-and-error, just add the damn data and done.

Thinking back, this just a brain dead "solution", but it came in very handy several times!

And that's why I don't like SOAP.