Notes on SOAP vs MIME-RPC
SOAP does not interoperate with existing browser based apps. MIME-RPC does.
SOAP does not do generic object serialization
SOAP forces the programmer to think about type coercion because it hides foreign data as base64encoded rather than labeling it with a useful type.
SOAP does not handle delivery of XML or other types well. MIME-RPC does.
The SOAP with attachments spec basically says to use MIME. If you are doing that, you might as well use MIME for everything (and therefore MIME-RPC).
The SOAP with attachments spec is ambiguous about the type of attached objects. Should the type be interpreted according to its mime content-type or according to some XML schema? MIME-RPC provides an unambiguous interpretation.
SOAP constrains method and variable names to be consistent with XML tag names. Many languages (e.g. SQL) allow method and parameter names that are not permitted in XML tags.
MIME-RPC is much easier to implement correctly than SOAP
MIME-RPC has less processing overhead than SOAP.
Questions/Comments/Additions? Send email to alex@i2x.com
Last update: January 7, 2002 by Alex Jacobson
(c) Copyright 2001 i2x, Inc.
MIME-RPC(tm) is a trademark of i2x, Inc.