So its my task to defend SOAP and so with a heavy dose of jet lag, I woke up this morning and intended to dive into the technical detail and start a technical ‘Battle Royal’ (one of my favourite films by the way) with my fellow panelists. However, my Sales Director keeps telling me that its time that Snowflake stops thinking technical features and focuses more on customer requirements. SME businesses like Snowflake often adopt a “build it and they will come strategy” – attracted by the latest technology and believing that customers want the latest big thing. That’s the line I want to take in putting my case for SOAP. Not a technical one, but a business one. SOAP is requirement its not a matter of whether there’s better webservices technology out there.

Snowflake supplies Data Exchange solutions to communities with large data volumes and complex data models. These communities are like super tankers, they define a course and stick to it. As it stands today a lot of these tankers left the dock and long time ago, way before the likes of RESTful became the next big thing. Communities have done the hard work, they’ve agreed exchange models and defined an architecture for data exchange. Its based on SOAP and its now time to implement. People want SOAP because its defined in their architecture, yes the new kids on the block are more agile, easier to use and hold a good technical argument, but you can’t get away from the fact that SOAP has momentum and people bought into it many years ago. There are many huge communities who are building with SOAP and the WS-* stack. In fact, entire countries have web services standards that mandate SOAP as a means of participating in centralized government infrastructure . No matter what technical argument, SOAP wins because it’s the building blocks of infrastructure.

By Ian Painter, Snowflake Software