Lessons learned launching a web service

Posted by Nelson Minar, Software Engineer

Seven weeks ago we launched the AdWords API, and since then had the chance to reflect on what we learned creating a new web service. I just gave a talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference about it, and here are the slides. Some of the (admittedly geeky) highlights: the value of document/literal style SOAP, a description of the real-world problems in building interoperable web services, and my opinion on when to use SOAP vs ReST. Despite the geek factor, perhaps it's useful for people building web services and developers using Google's own services.