When you still ship SOAP/XML APIs, your coffin meme hits differently
Description
The meme has three stacked images. The first two show identical plain wooden coffins photographed from above; white block text labels the top coffin "RICH PEOPLE" and the second "POOR PEOPLE," implying death is the great equalizer. The third frame is a blurry, zoom-lens shot of someone on a small motorboat rolling a wrapped body over the side into the ocean; overlaid text reads "DEVS WHO STILL MAKE SOAP AND/OR XML APIS INSTEAD OF JSON." The joke contrasts universal mortality with the exaggerated fate of developers clinging to legacy SOAP/XML interfaces instead of modern JSON-based REST designs, poking fun at outdated integration choices and highlighting how strongly today’s engineering culture favors lightweight JSON APIs
Comments
9Comment deleted
We don’t fire teammates who still propose new SOAP endpoints - we just wrap them in a WSDL, push them onto the ESB, and let the next generation discover the body during post-mortems
The real tragedy isn't choosing SOAP over REST - it's explaining to the new hire why the 15-year-old enterprise integration still requires a 500-line WSDL file and three XML namespaces just to return a boolean
The real tragedy isn't the SOAP itself - it's explaining to your microservices-native junior dev why the enterprise client insists on a 47-layer XML envelope with WS-Security headers just to fetch a user's email address, when a simple GET request would suffice. At least the coffins are REST-ful
The only thing heavier than a coffin is the XML payload from a SOAP fault with WS-Security enabled
Rich devs REST in JSON peace; poor ones buried alive in SOAP XML bloat
Our REST modernization replaced a WSDL with OpenAPI, dropped XML, then reimplemented WS-* as custom headers - basically SOAP that renders in dark mode
Don't give 'em ideas, man... Comment deleted
Totally agree 😊 Implemented integration from Salesforce to one service with soap api and, moreover, WITHOUT WSDL. So,had to implement parsing of really giant xmls(up to 15000 of nodes). Comment deleted
That must have been painful Comment deleted