SOAP - Coming to a mozilla browser near you
The Mozilla project is about to turn on one of it's most exciting new features inside of the default nightly build you download every day (right???).
It's SOAP, the buzzword of the last six months. Now this isn't some webservices, .net style hype about products that don't exist or business models that haven't been figured out.
This is a real boon to web developers.
Why?
Because the introduction of SOAP allows us to eliminate a lot of server side work.
As any web developer will tell you, the most dynamic part of any webpage is processing the business logic on the server side (be it in ASP, JSP, Perl, etc) and integrating it into the HTML that you see in your browser.
When it comes to hooking into a database to return a list of products or getting a stock quote, you need to get that information on the server and build it into your webpage.
Well, not anymore. With SOAP in you browser, you are simply making a RPC call using SOAP like you would to any COM, EJB or other component from your server side scripting.
The difference is that you're making the call from the browser from Javascript, dynamically updated your web page with Javascipt and DHTML and voila! You've cut out a huge chunk of code and integrated it into your webpage.
This is going to allow web developers to do some really cool things in their webpages.
For example, take a Hotmail style application. How nice would it be to type an LDAP address into Hotmail and have it bring back a list of contacts without reloading the page?
This should be fun...
Comments
While SOAP's less complicated and more accessible counterpart, XMLRPC, has been in the nightlies for MONTHS. Check out MozBlog: http://mozblog.mozdev.org , using XMLRPC in Mozilla.
Yeah, XML-RPC is easier to wrap one's brain around, but SOAP is getting the press, and a lot of companies are staking a lot on the adoption of SOAP as the standard RPC protocol over HTTP. I suspect most developers will only use a fraction of what SOAP supplies, though; stuff you can just as easily accomplish with XML-RPC.
Well, not to be rude, but this has been available in IE for a while (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/webservice/overview.asp)... :)
You're right, IE does have SOAP integration. That's what makes this so cool.
Now both browsers can talk to any SOAP server they want to.
I just hope the implementation is the same, otherwise it could be another Netscape Layers vs. IE's DOM scenario (to a lesser extent).
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