i am digging into soap now, and it’s a mess who would have thought that installing soap on apache were such an undertaking? since soap for apache is basically donated java code from ibm, it of course relies on the entire java framework for apache being present.

1 thing i always hated about java was the incredible mess it had with all its 100s of directories, 10s of config files, $CLASSPATH and so on. now while many open source projects have not exactly been known for good documentation (perhaps this “lesser task” is beneath self-declared hackers) it seems to be worse with open source projects in java.

anyway i did not have the nerve after a full days work to read up on all these arcane details i frankly could care less about. so no soap for apache today.

competing with .net does not just mean whipping together a soap stack and create some bindings for php, perl and python. web services is about leveraging infrastructure to get quick results. if you have to fiddle around with configuration details you could just as well skip web services. there is a strong need for a ready to run soap package where everything is already neatly configured and integrated. you should be able to have a hello world up and running in minutes. that’s what they deliver today on the microsoft side of the fence.

• Uncategorized