Products · Pattern or everyday thing
SOAP
Raised as a usability problem by 25 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 23 threads.
People raised many different problems with SOAP, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 26 complaints
- WSDL files are impossible to obtain and don't match the deployed service2026-09-15
- Can't find previously bought products after packaging redesigns make them unrecognisable2026-04-19
- Overly complicated standards; hard to make clients from different languages interoperate2025-08-09
- Tooling is incompatible, so the commenter must hand-generate SOAP envelopes for each integration2023-01-03
- SOAP web services are completely horrible and unusable to work with2022-07-16
- Concepts hard to understand and issues hard to debug, even with Visual Studio2021-09-10
- Hard to use and get right in the author's experience2020-10-30
- SOAP implementations from different vendors can't communicate without very specific configuration2018-11-20
- SOAP is too complicated to use without tooling, and is a nightmare when it fails2018-11-19
- SOAP client libraries too complicated; author couldn't get one working with the API2018-07-19
- SOAP is buggy, incompatible and painful to use in practice2018-06-07
- Strict element ordering causes validation errors that are hard to diagnose2018-05-09
- SOAP on the CLI means reading unusable raw XML2017-12-07
- Constantly changing WSDLs must be regenerated and redistributed to all partners after every schema change2017-10-24
- Debugging failed calls means reading XML with outdated, auto-generated type definitions2017-10-24
- Developers face huge cognitive overhead, slow-to-build libraries, and unclear error causes2016-12-19
- Libraries implement SOAP differently, causing incompatibilities and XML envelope debugging2016-01-29
- Early tooling was poor, giving the commenter a negative user experience2014-12-09
- Messages are verbose and redundant, and things are hard to understand when they fail2014-12-09
- SOAP complex XML types are hard to construct and its documentation is harder to read2013-02-24
- Writing SOAP APIs by hand with semi-complicated WSDL is a nightmare without tooling2013-02-22
- Too complex to debug at lower levels and fails cross-platform2012-08-27
- When SOAP breaks, the wire messages are hard to wade through to debug2011-06-23
- Debugging SOAP is a complete nightmare2011-01-27
- Generated client code behaves inconsistently on complex data; streaming is hard to handle2010-12-22
- Implementing SOAP clients against varied servers is painful, fiddly tweaking2010-10-16