Software as a service is great... until the service goes away. One small example is Google turning off future use of their search API in preference to an opaque set of JavaScript routines that shoot out whatever HTML Google wants as part of the query.

The O'Reilly Google Hacks book? Time to go to that big recycler in the sky. What's interesting to me is that Tim manages to get a dig in at Microsoft within the O'Reilly Radar post on Google turning off this API:

Update #2: Tim writes: On the other hand, SOAP has always been a political football shaped by big companies who were seeking to use it to turn web services back into a controllable software stack. (I remember the first web services summit we did, where a Microsoft developer who I won't name admitted that SOAP was made so complex partly because "we want our tools to read it, not people.")

Source: O'Reilly Radar > Google Deprecates Their SOAP Search API.

What The Fudge does that have to do with Google turning off an Alpha-Geek service? Microsoft certainly didn't twist Google's - or Amazon's - arm to adopt SOAP. It was their choice. No football game involved. It was the XML-hotness at the time. I'm leaning more towards XML RPC and Plain Old XML, myself. SOAP is nice for when you want to do some heavy object lifting and need something more standard to connect pieces together. But if you can URL paramter encode your request and throw on something like "?response=text\xml" and get XML back, all the better.

Use the big SOAP hammer for the big SOAP nail.

Anyway. Google Search SOAP API is dead. Or at least checked in to the bit-bucket hospice. And I'd say everyone who relies on Google (or any third party) remote service had a nice little, "Hmm..." to roll around in their head today: "What would happen if they went and shut off their service I'm using tomorrow?"

Hmm.

Might be mighty nice to think about having some rich client content.