How RSS/Atom Is Replacing Web Services

I have to admit that the title of this article really caught me off guard. While there is no question that RSS is a real enhancement to things, I just never thought much about it replacing Web services.

I had one of those odd little epiphany moments (maybe my meds ran out) as I was looking through the list of Firefox extensions that there were any number of stock tickers there. This by itself is obvious - stock tickers and RSS go together like Apache and Perl, but then it occurred to me that the canonical example of SOAP based web services has been the stock market quote, practically from the very beginning of the whole web services game.

In most cases, stock quotes coming from RSS usually work in one of two ways - they pass the information as tagged HTML (RSS2), or they pass the information as XML (Atom). What they do not come out as is SOAP based response packets. In some cases the initial URL may be parameterized, usually via a GET based parameterization scheme, but in other cases it is the responsibility of the client to filter out the irrelevant content. [Read the rest]