[OSGeo-Discuss] a SOAP bubble

[Jo Walsh]

dear all,

The Draft Implementing Rules for Network Services for geodata 
as part of the European Spatial Data Infrastructure (INSPIRE)
are going to be published before too long, and when they are, 
they will mandate SOAP for interfacing with all OGC web services.

'What?' one cries. 'SOAP [...]'. And the poor European Commission
are going to have to listen to a lot of opinions about what a good
and what a bad thing this is for people writing geographic information
software and trying to get public authorities in Europe to use it. 

It would be so great to collect some kind of real numbers looking
outside the GI domain even. Like back when there was a SOAP bubble
a few years ago and Google, Amazon et al ran parallel SOAP and REST
style services. Google dropped SOAP for GMaps. Could we get those
kinds of numbers? Is anyone in GIS really supporting SOAP enough that
one could get comparative realworld numbers? 

I would also be really interested in getting impact assessment from 
client software of an change like this - like SOAP support would be a
big deal for an intentionally light-footprint package like OpenLayers.

Any thoughts at all welcome here:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/SOAP


jo
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