XML-RPC vs. SOAP: An Overview

masukomi writes: "After watching a recent discussion where someone wondered what the difference was between XML-RPC and SOAP and which to use I set about answering this question for myself. The result was this basic overview of the two protocols (also in acrobat format)."

Comments

W3C ratification

[xyzzy]

The biggest difference is that SOAP is a W3C-ratified protocol, while XML-RPC is not.

SOAP also isn't that hard to use -- using a package prevents you from ever having to look at the wire protocol. SOAP::Lite makes using SOAP completely trivial.

Re:W3C ratification

[cmowire]

Yeah, but what does the leg up give it? SOAP is suffering from the too-many-cooks sort of problem that is taking it away from being a simple protocal.

And, since the standard isn't complete but people are implementing it, it probably won't be any more standard than old-fashioned RPC, where everybody extended it and such to build your own standard. (i.e. DCOM is technically an implementation of RPC, but not really)

What's most likely to happen is that nobody will win. MS people will use MS's purposefully broken SOAP implementation, some others will use real SOAP, and others will just use XML-RPC.

Which will eliminate many of the supposed advantages of any of the protocals.

xml-rpc: no unicode

[GCP]

xml-rpc is limited to ASCII. You couldn't even use it for French or Spanish, much less use it for all languages. No company with any sense would use a text-based system limited to ASCII in the 21st Century. Even DOS 1.0 was more advanced than that.