• Reported by Brian

In a recent XML.com article critical of Google's new SOAP API, Paul Prescod writes :

"Imagine the surprise at Google reviving the service, adding new features, documenting and promoting it. But Google also moved it to an inferior technical platform, SOAP RPC running over HTTP POST. On many mailing lists, weblogs and discussion groups the reaction was mixed. It felt like one step forward and two steps back."

In his piece, Prescod looks at the 3 methods (doGoogleSearch, doSpellingSuggestion, and doGetCachedPage) in Google's new SOAP API with an eye towards how they could be "HTTP-ified" and extolls the advantages of an HTTP API (foremost among them being the addressability of query result information via URIs) over an RPC-style interface.