[OAI-implementers] SOAP-PMH

[Matthew Cockerill]

> > Migrating OAI to use SOAP as its transport does seem long overdue...
>
> 
> Disagreed from one implementer, at least. Having to work with SOAP 
> would've made this developer less happy...
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Martijn

I should clarify - I wasn't saying that SOAP should or must be the *only*
syntax for expressing OAI requests.
REST has many benefits. A lot of services are  provided with SOAP and REST
interfaces.
And it wouldn't be so difficult to provide a gateway that could support the
legacy OAI  syntax,  to prevent archive implementers from having to rework
all their stuff.

But SOAP does have significant traction (again, I would point to
www.sforce.com as just one example: and note that Salesforce.com is a
company that *seriously* know what it is doing technically).

And SOAP takes care of all kinds of housekeeping issues that everyone has to
roll their own version of, when implementing an OAI-PMH client using raw
http and XML processing.

Matt

By the way:
I totally agree with Matt Dovey's points detailing some of the respective
(in many ways complementary) strengths of REST/REST-like approaches vs
SOAP.
 
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