Invisible wrote:
> But then, we're talking about a weakly-typed language, so unfortunately 
> it's kind of unavoidable...

Actually, it's not. (I saw a couple of online lectures about it.) It's not 
even noticably harder.  You just have to look at the entire program to do it 
right, which Smalltalk's method rename doesn't do.

(I don't think Smalltalk's method rename was what I was talking about. This 
is later, like during the big XP craze.)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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Invisible wrote:
> I'm reasonably sure there are no text-mode browsers that run JavaScript

elinks has browser scripting in Perl, Ruby, Lua, and some support for JS. It
also has tabs, support for clicking links using the mouse, some CSS
features, and experimental BitTorrent downloading.

And it's still text mode.

(I can even confirm the mouse feature works over ssh)

Links2 lacks a lot of that stuff but has better JS support. However it
doesn't seem to even have its own website...

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Darren New wrote:
> Yeah. I can't tell you how often people have said "The interface is easy.
> It's XML."   "Oh, can I have the schema?"   "We don't have one, but here's
> some example records."   WTF?

I kept a quote from one of your posts in this newsgroup.

"XML: We're too lazy to document our data interchange formats, so we're
hoping that by using an inefficient format, it'll include enough
information that you can guess what we mean by looking at examples. Plus,
it lets us pretend to parse it correctly by writing simple but incorrect
code ourselves!" 

(btw, in the same post there were other "descriptions", about SOAP and
something else, but I can't find them; do you still have them?)

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> (btw, in the same post there were other "descriptions", about SOAP and
> something else, but I can't find them; do you still have them?)

That sort of rant is something that flows from the hatred, not unlike the 
dark side.  I don't keep them written down. :-)

The one about SOAP was people using an RPC tool whose only benefit is that 
you can automate the stub generation, then not providing the document that 
automates the stub generation and using SOAP libraries that only talk to 
themselves because they do the wrong thing with the stubs they should have 
automated. (I'm looking at you, SOAPlite.php!)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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Darren New wrote:
> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>> (btw, in the same post there were other "descriptions", about SOAP and
>> something else, but I can't find them; do you still have them?)
> 
> That sort of rant is something that flows from the hatred, not unlike the
> dark side.  I don't keep them written down. :-)

I thought you had taken them from a website or something :)

> The one about SOAP was people using an RPC tool whose only benefit is that
> you can automate the stub generation, then not providing the document that
> automates the stub generation and using SOAP libraries that only talk to
> themselves because they do the wrong thing with the stubs they should have
> automated. (I'm looking at you, SOAPlite.php!)

I remember asking why on Earth the S in SOAP stood for "Simple". I was told
it's simple compared to things like CORBA.

I really don't want to know anything about CORBA now.

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> I thought you had taken them from a website or something :)

No. When I post rants from web sites, I include the links. My .sig and my 
complaints are always mine. :-)

> I remember asking why on Earth the S in SOAP stood for "Simple". I was told
> it's simple compared to things like CORBA.

It's simple in the sense that you connect from your computer to the server, 
exchange a message, and drop the connection. CORBA gives you things like 
directories, proxies, data conversion servers, etc etc etc.  So SOAP gets 
the message there and back. CORBA in addition tells you where the message is 
  supposed to go, whether someone's server is working, what message you're 
allowed to send next, and stuff like that.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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Darren New wrote:
> It's simple in the sense that you connect from your computer to the
> server, exchange a message, and drop the connection. CORBA gives you
> things like
> directories, proxies, data conversion servers, etc etc etc.  So SOAP gets
> the message there and back. CORBA in addition tells you where the message
> is
>   supposed to go, whether someone's server is working, what message you're
> allowed to send next, and stuff like that.
> 

It's still a huge complex mess compared to, say, XMLRPC. Or even a
completely custom REST API, at least you don't absolutely need a library to
use it (while implementing SOAP from scratch is a huge pain).

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> It's still a huge complex mess compared to, say, XMLRPC. Or even a
> completely custom REST API, at least you don't absolutely need a library to
> use it (while implementing SOAP from scratch is a huge pain).

Yes, but you only implement SOAP from scratch once. Then you feed WSDL into 
your codebase and viola.

I'll take WSDL over an implement-each-interface-manually any day.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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Darren New wrote:
> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>> It's still a huge complex mess compared to, say, XMLRPC. Or even a
>> completely custom REST API, at least you don't absolutely need a library
>> to use it (while implementing SOAP from scratch is a huge pain).
> 
> Yes, but you only implement SOAP from scratch once. Then you feed WSDL
> into your codebase and viola.
> 
> I'll take WSDL over an implement-each-interface-manually any day.

Doesn't mean it's not complex, just that the complexity is in a library.

And the pain was from when I tried to access a SOAP service to get weather
forecasts, from an environment without any SOAP library. Heck, the XML
parser didn't even understand namespaces, I had to add that feature myself
on top (parsing xmlns attributes etc).

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Doesn't mean it's not complex, just that the complexity is in a library.

Sure. But that's where it belongs. You're supposed to encapsulate complexity 
in a library. Once that's done once, using SOAP is completely trivial 
(unless your SOAP tracks changes and your library doesn't handle the cookies 
for you, but that's just bad design).

> And the pain was from when I tried to access a SOAP service to get weather
> forecasts, from an environment without any SOAP library. 

Sure. Without a SOAP library, it's more complex than doing a one-off. With 
the library, it's way easier than doing a one-off. Having done both, I'll 
take using the library, Bob.

It was pretty annoying to do SOAP calls to the broken library the data 
provider was using, that didn't do SOAP right, too. (Of course, they 
couldn't even get base64 working, either, and that's like 5 lines in C.)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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