Saturday, January 30, 2010

Google API’s are Soap-less

@YaronNaveh

 
A few months ago Google officially retired its Soap search Api and put an Ajax search Api instead. The official reason was that it’s moving to a “new generation” Api, however some comments claimed for a conspiracy where Google is trying to push ads into the results or trying to prevent consumers from reordering them. Since Google’s search engine main business is ads it makes sense for them to reduce the number of non-Html Api consumers.

Google Apps however do not rely solely on ads. When organizations pay to get their domains in apps they expect to get some Api for their calendar, documents and etc. With this Api Google chose to be Rest/Atom based.

And I haven’t mentioned yet Google Protocol Buffersa proprietary an open source serialization format developed by Google.

It seems Google likes to do stuff its own way. In some cases it’s a commercial trick to force its ads on Api users. This is a legitimate move but as long as they insist the real reason is a better “new generation” we can call it a trick. In other cases Google claim their new format is better than existing ones. protobuf is one example. However it’s a shame that every vendor comes up with its own formats. In this particular case, some of the other encodings in the market include Microsoft binary xml encoding  and xml fast infoset.

If you’re really into this Soap & Search thing try the Bing Wsdl

@YaronNaveh

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