Simon Fell > Its just code > Reach

Dare comments on a comment from Dave Winer talking about reach and inclusivity when building services. While in principle I agree that the more ways a given service can expose itself can give wider reach and make it more inclusive to different technologies, what I also see is that those multi protocol services tend to be cop outs. What I mean is that either the service is exposed through a primary protocol, and the other protocol offerings are simple wrappers (like the Live Expo services which has a laughably stupid soap api, all it does it transport the REST service results around as a string inside a soap envelope, why would you ever you this soap API, its not even like the code generators can do anything particularly useful with the WSDL. Another case of do as I say and not do as I do from MSFT). The other approach I've seen is that the services become limited by the lowest common demoninators of the protocol features, you can see this in Frontier/Radio where the SOAP stack doesn't really support anything more than the xml-rpc stack it has supports (even though SOAP does support a lot more). If you're going to expose your service through multiple protocols then I really think that should it should be done in such as way as to take full advantage of the features of each protocol.