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.