49

Start a development job.
Boss: "let's start you off with something very easy. There's this third party we need data from. They have an api, just get the data and place it on our messaging bus."
Me: "sure, sounds easy enough"

Third party api turns out to have the most retarded conversation protocol. With us needing a service to receive data on while also having a client to register for the service. With a lot of timed actions like, 'send this message every five minutes' and 'check whether our last message was sent more than 11 minutes ago'.
Due to us needing a service, we also need special permissions through the company firewall. So I have to go around the company to get these permissions, FOR EVERY DATA STREAM WE NEED!

But the worst of it all is... This whole api is SOAP based!!

Also, Hey DevRant!

Comments
  • 4
    Well. Soap when both platforms work well together is very easy.

    In c# I just register the soap url and get a class with all methods in that handles everything under the hood and also all soap defined classes are replicated to real c# classes.

    From php its a bit more work but a colleague wrote a class generating script that does mostly the same for php. Java also has something similar.

    But if you have to implement a client on your own its another story.

    Version 1 of the webservice standard was ambiguous on how arrays should be implemented and naturally c# and java choose different paths so any api with an array was unusable from the other language.

    So I had to do our own implementation using xml parser and write, thats not something I like to do again.
  • 2
    @Voxera To make things worse, all complex objects was not located as children to their parents but as separate objects under the root and linked by a ref object so when building you objects you had to have multiple instances of the reader, one for each complex child level.
  • 1
    I'm using java and spring. The basic SOAP was easy, but once the special requirements came into the picture, SOAP made it a hell of a lot harder to get things done right.
  • 10
    Well, i think that is not very SOAPisticated api ..
  • 1
    now imagine you need to do same but without api docs
Add Comment