I think we’ve realised at Wapple that when it comes to web services, not everyone always has the same level of technology that we have at our finger tips and completely take for granted.
Take my Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress for example, and the way it used to communicate with Wapple’s web services. It used to use SOAP simply because that was the protocol we chose to employ as our means for delivering web services.
SOAP is not always available!
Now don’t get me wrong, what we’ve got is a really smart, well-designed and developed web service that’s both extensible and easy to use. But the fact was that if you hadn’t got SOAP, you wouldn’t be able to use it. And if you’d only got a shared host available, you might not be lucky enough to have a decent one like me (Evohosting) who allow you to install SOAP on your server.
So what we’ve done is to create corresponding REST web services so you can use Wapple Architect and your dev key, but either request data through a URL by modifying a query string, or through a POST request with something like curl.
Nothing can stop you now!
This is fantastic news all round. For developers who are experimenting with Architect, it’s even easier to develop. And as we’ve already incorporated this new technology into our plugins for WordPress and Joomla, you can use it even if you don’t want to delve into code!
The latest release of the WordPress mobile plugin is out now (version 1.4) – have a read of the full feature list and the new REST web service support in an article over at Mobile Web Junkie.
On a more general note, what do you prefer to use, SOAP or REST? Or maybe XMLRPC? If you haven’t got a clue about any of this but would still like to have a go at leaving a suitably technical comment, here’s a few words you may want to include: “combobulating”, “aerodynamics” and “flux capacitor”.
Head of Development @ Wapple
Tea Drinker Extraordinaire
Related posts:
Tags: Joomla, REST, SOAP, Wapple, Web Services, wordpress mobile plugin, XMLRPC
Personally, I prefer to use REST. I think the aerodynamics over the interweb of REST compared to SOAP are far superioir.
Also, building a SOAP request can sometimes be a bit of a hassle, having to get a WSDL, work out what to send, build the SOAP envelope etc. It sometimes feels like I’m combobulating a flux capacitor just to make one little web service call.