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How not to do SOAP

24 May

If you are not already familiar with SOAP, this note will mean very little to you, and I don’t feel like explaining it so please feel free to ignore.

We are in the middle of adding a new payment processor to GS, and this particular payment processor, who shall remain unnamed, decided to implement their API in SOAP. I am not a huge fan of SOAP, but it certainly does have some level of usefulness: the entire backend API for GSLite is written in SOAP, after all. Anyway, their implementation of SOAP is the silliest I have seen so far. Every method takes a single parameter. It’s a string named ixml.

Can you guess yet what they are doing?

Yes, every parameter is a piece of xml. The actual structure of the xml message is not defined in the WSDL. In other words, the Web Service Description Language does not describe the web service. Good job, guys.

 
 

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