Google Deprecates SOAP API

Michi writes "Brady Forrest at O'Reilly Radar reports that Google has deprecated their SOAP API; they aren't giving out any new SOAP Search API keys. Nelson Minar (the original author of the Google SOAP API) argues that this move is motivated by business reasons rather than technical ones. Does this mark the beginning of the end for SOAP or for ubiquitous middleware in general?" Forrest's post quotes developer Paul Bausch: "This is such a bad move because the Google API was the canonical example of how web services work. Not only is Google Hacks based on this API, but hundreds of other books and online examples use the Google API to show how to incorporate content from another site into a 3rd party application."

Comments

Honeymoon is Over?

[P(0)(!P(k) P(k 1))]

From TFA:

I remember the first web services summit we did, where a Microsoft developer who I won't name admitted that SOAP was made so complex partly because "we want our tools to read it, not people."

Just as I suspected: SOAP suffers from an artificial (read: gratuitous) complexity; what more do you need besides XML-RPC, anyway?

Google quietly shutting down services, on the other hand, reminds me of differentiating stem-cells: the honeymoon is over.

Re:Honeymoon is Over?

[rbanffy]

Any technology that requires a specific tool to write code for it is way too complex.

Without a Next-Next-Finish wizard, SOAP is a pain. With the tool it's mildly uncomfortable.

Re:Honeymoon is Over?

[timeOday]

This isn't about deprecating SOAP in favor of something simpler, is it? Sounds to me like google wants people to visit their website to use their services. Which, once again, proves why the semantic web and web services will never fly. Companies don't want to make their data and services available to each other.

Re:Honeymoon is Over?

[WasterDave]

Yes indeed it is. The cool kids see externally provided services and say "mashup! mashup! mashup!", the old timers see them and say "risk! risk! risk!".

Dave

Re:Honeymoon is Over?

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies don't want to make their data and services available to each other.

I don't think it's so much that companies don't want to as it is that there is no money in it.

If Amazon provided an API for buying stuff, I think it would stick around

If eBay provided an API for listing / searching, I think it would stick around.

Google, however, provides their product strictly for advertising revenue...it's wayyyy too easy for a consumer of the content to filter out the thing Google makes their money from.

It's very similar to the problem with Tivo's (PVR's) and commercial television. Luckily in that case, the television providers don't make their money directly from advertising revenue...

Re:Honeymoon is Over?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Companies don't want to make their data and services available to each other.

But people do. Why does everything we do have to be dictated by what a company would do? There are ways to achieve things in life other than to wait for a company to do it.

Re:Honeymoon is Over?

[jd]

AJAX, SOAP and so on are all based on the premise that there are ways of abstracting out a lot of the complexity of service/user and service/service interactions. That assumption, I believe, is essentially correct. From that premise, these standards go on to assume that vendors are the right people to make such abstractions. Here is where the error lies. Vendors are notorious for producing crippled standards (such as SQL) that require vendor extensions to be usable. At a recent PCI-SIG conference, I was amazed at both the obviously stupid limitations of the standards and the gratuitous "vendor extension" options that very obviously existed so that vendors could provide proprietary solutions to those limitations. If a standard cannot stand, it ceases to be a standard and becomes little more than a cub scout badge.

(Another case: I cannot name a single well-designed W3C spec that was consortium-driven, and cannot name a single consortium-driven W3C spec that was well-designed.)

Web service standards cannot be driven by the very people who profit most from non-standard solutions. Even when they are designed well, they will STILL carry unacceptable flaws precisely because they are not driven by a collective itch but by a desire to stop someone else's scratch being the one that's used. The day a truly open federation of user-developers (you need a group of people where each person is both user AND developer) who have no ulterior motive beyond solving the service issue is formed will be the day that you see a protocol that requires no "perfect case study", proprietary extensions, overweight IDEs, etc. It will just work and be just used. Same as every other system developed that way has always just worked and just been used.

Re:Honeymoon is Over?

[Kazoo the Clown]

Yes, and where XML really shines is in turning a 1M record database query from 30MB of text into 150MB of text...

Well it was 'just' a Beta

[rednip]

Well it was 'just' a Beta, but then again so is gmail, Google maps, and every other neat Google application. Of course as a gmail user it does give me pause, as to what I'm really doing.

(SOAP is a WS) != (WS is SOAP)

[MrData]

Simpy put the Author of the article has it all wrong. SOAP is a type of Web Service but not all web services use SOAP.

loss, opportunity, lesson or deja-vu?

[siddesu]

Yawn... Google is a company. Regardless of the marketing bullshit they spew on, they aren't in the business of providing APIs (or whatever), they are in the business of making money. Anything else is subject to change.

Their responsibility is more towards their shareholders, not so much towards their users. So, if they think one of their products -- be that APIs, ajax apps or whatever are providing diminishing returns for some reason, they'll axe it unless it is popular enough so that too many users feel ripped off. APIs aren't in the category at all.

Also, the bigger they get, the more expensive the stock becomes, and the more their ownership sreads, the more clout the bean counters have over any other management ideology.

So, if one relies exclusively to Google for anything, better check your contract with Google carefully and assess all risks (including risk from expensive litigation) first.

Re:Google branding?

[FooAtWFU]

So, skimming the Google AJAX Search API example code pages, it looks like a big part of this is to attach Google's name and image to everything your web page or web app does with the data Google provides. Does that seem to anyone else like a fair assessment? If so, is it a fair practice?

Well, since Google is the one who aggregated it in the first place... and is paying for the processing power and bandwidth requirements that go along with that... what's unfair about the practice? (It's not like they're really preventing one from giving you similar data, or somehow stealing away value from any of the sites they've indexed, or...)

Of course they dropped it...

[MancDiceman]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the SOAP search results didn't come back with ads embedded in them. The AJAX API tools are capable of putting ad content in their results, as can the maps API because Google is controlling the display elements.

Given that Google want to run their business off the back of ad revenues, it should come as no surprise they're getting rid of services that don't allow them to sell lots and lots of ads. I also imagine that the cost of providing the SOAP interface was higher than any subscription fees would have brought in due to a small market. What's more, it would directly help their competitors pull in results from Google and run their own ads alongside it. The API was neat, but from a business perspective it was always an experiment at best.

Personally, I'd rather they brought something RESTful like Yahoo's interface or xml-rpc to the table, and charged us all a couple of cents per 100 queries, but that isn't going to happen any time soon.