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I was thinking, Spanish people must be wondering, "what do all these nerds have against soup?".
And all english-speaking people must think, "what do all these nerds have against soap?".
these nerds - they rarely shower !!!
Yep, every time I ask a non-nerd what they think about SOPA, they answer "Why, it's delicious!".
Finally a movement I can get behind!
Well in contrary to the SOPA people, the SOAP people aren't trying to forcibly push SOAP on all of us with laws and treaties. There's enough alternatives. Let them use SOAP :p
Unless you have to integrate with their "mission critical" SOAP based "enterprise solution".
I can't shake the association between your comment and the one calling to "please drop the soap"
SOAP is no more the acronym of Simple Object Access Protocol since version 1.2
That's no excuse (and if you read the article you'd know that it acknowledges this fact).
Agreed, When i started SOAP around 2000, it was very simple. After that we for more into the awful WSDL 1 (WSDL 2 is better). But the number of WS-* and the different implementations that are all incompatible is just a nightmare.
In 2001 I gave a talk (I believe at OSCon, to a packed audience) titled "Why SOAP Sucks". I started with a print-out of all the specs required to implement SOAP fully (there were lots of incomplete implementations around at the time, but barely any complete ones). It was more than two reams of paper (around 1100 pages of spec, if I recall). It had quite an "impact".
IIRC, the Table of Contents for the SOAP spec is bigger than the entire XML-RPC spec, yet SOAP offers little practical advantage. Luckily many new RPC implementations bypass both SOAP and XML-RPC and are looking to REST. $deity help all of us who need to work with legacy SOAP, however...
I can totally relate to these two articles, having recently attempted to write a .NET SOAP client for a web service that uses the (non-standard) SOAP with Attachments method for sending binary data. For something that was created to provide simple interoperability, SOAP is rife with a ridiculous number of inconsistencies and competing mini-(non)standards.
protocols with simple (or lightweight) in their name usually are anything but.
Not a coincidence. Simple to implement != simple to explain to your boss (`it's standard industry practice'). The name is meant to sell the standard to non-techies.
As someone who recently had to deal with a system with two different (incompatible) SOAP services, I fully endorse the message behind this site.

Luckily my exposure seems to be restricted to legacy and enterprisey stuff nowadays.

Finally, a legit movement for us non-americans!! How are we supposed to protest against this? cover our pages with bubbles?
You must stop bathing for one week and blog about the results.
One does not simply get some REST.
There is a "REST in peace" joke there as well.
I'll admit to being completely ignorant about the benefits of using SOAP to communicate between servers. However I can say that for server->client communication it is the worse data representation I've ever had to work with and I genuinely hope we see the end of it. JSON maybe not be perfect, but it's so much better at delivering a structured data model then xml is.
You seem to be confused between SOAP and Restful XML Web Services? They are different...
You don't think you can replace one with the other?
I think I'd like JSON as a data representation a lot more if schemas for it were more prevalent. I've noticed it's a lot harder to generate valid JSON -- or rather a lot harder to escape data. With XML, this is fairly trivial. Granted, my use case is considerably different from most.

The other idea from SOAP I'd love to see applied to ReST is a descriptor document for the API. Given how poorly many ReST APIs are documented, I do miss the good 'ol WSDL. Plus, it gave me some measure of security that the API didn't change.

The strictness in generating valid json is exactly why i like it so much. I've worked with too many SOAP services with nodes and attributes thrown lazily around the document simply because xml is so unstructured. I do agree however that json could use a few more built-in data types to handle more complex use cases.
There's also XMLRPC which is as simple as JSON and still XML
Unfortunately I spent a couple years building web services tools in 2002,3. I have long since repented. Love the "S stands for Simple" link... fantastic dialog!
Almost thought it was SOPA.. misspelled article..:-P Agree.. SOAP is way to verbose....and annoying to read manually while debugging...
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Friends don't let friends do SOAP.
Someone went searching for "Stop SOPA" and discovered something brilliant from their typo.
So much efforts to stop law proposal X. Which is great.

What about the idea of a Open-USA or other Open-Iran where a true Meta-Democracy or whatever open society model is implemented where all efforts would be PRO something instead of hateful stuff like protesting.

This laws are proposed by lobbies that go against the interest of 99% of the persons. How is that even conceivable ?

All this big companies opposing could create a github project for open government and then elect a person that implements that.

We should use SOPA againt SOAP and ask internet providers acroos the globe to block access to every server that runs a SOAP webservice.
I am not Barrack Obama, and I endorse this message.
oh i see what you did there

*sorry, reddit is down

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It helps if you click the article link and understand the content, before commenting.
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More tragic than HN becoming an advocacy site (the beginning of Slashdot's demise) is how many comments here don't get the joke.
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I agree. Sure discussions about SOPA have their place here, but lately it just felt like a bit echo chamber where you have the same people preaching to the choir using the same arguments over and over again.

If I look at the homepage right now it seems half the posts are "site XXX blacked out to protest SOPA". Do all those need a separate story? The redditization of HN is running wild.

Will september ever end?

Indeed. Another irony, the Cheezburger Network sites are using a pop-up complaining about SOPA, when arguably they are just the sort of site there is a legitimate complaint about, as they routinely rip off other people's comments, and bask in the ad revenue.
Since when is being a web programmer a prerequisite to participating on HN?
I think what the OP meant is that this story is meant as a parody of the avalanche of "sopa is evil" posts lately. Whether you know what SOAP is or not is beyond the point.
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The population of HN isn't just anti-SOPA because it's fashionable. SOPA would directly affect small internet businesses by putting the onus of copyright policing on site owners. Considering how many of the HN startups have any user generated content at all, it's a real concern for the vast majority of them. To not advocate against SOPA would be foolish.
REST in peace, SOAP.
This is great - put on some tweet/fb like/+1 buttons so we can help spread the word.
I'm against Stop SOAP. SOAP is a jobs-protocol.

In the current economy, consultants specialized in fixing convoluted web applications need us more than ever.

I agree. We need SOAP to stop the JSON loving bit thieves trying to steal our intellectual overhead (IO). Don't drop the SOAP!