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> from whatever language and framework you like

Eh, not really. Python SOAP clients are bad and have always been. In reality, SOAP works well only when using platforms sold by commercial vendors, who invested heavily in producing tools for it in an attempt to generate lock-in for their tools. Which means interop issues between platforms, for anything beyond the trivial case, are rife.

Whereas REST is so basic that you literally need nothing more than a standard HTTP client (and a JSON parser, these days; back then it would be some hand-rolled XML or even just encoded form-like data).



One of my favorite tricks with REST is sending a complete, bug-reproduction to a vendor as a simple one-line curl command. No arguing back and forth, just tell me when this curl command works properly.


Not a SOAP advocate by any means, but there's nothing stopping you from sending a curl command with an xml payload to a soap endpoint


Spose you're right, but I've never tickled a SOAP interface with curl. I fire up a python script when I need to do even the most basic interaction with a SOAP endpoint because, as Dustin Hoffman says in Hook, "Brace yourself lad, because this is really going to hurt."


I tend to go with RPC style apis with JSON/Protofbuf payloads for most things these days. IMHO it's the best of both worlds.


Python is actually where most of my experience with SOAP was. Import suds, point it at the WSDL, get on with your program. I had far fewer interop issues with that than with all the different ways people implement "REST".


Import suds, ditto.




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