3 comments

  • Waterluvian 1 hour ago
    GIS APIs using SOAP are often going to be ArcGIS Server based APIs. If I recall correctly, you can literally just check a box to expose a REST API as well. SOAP was also just a checkbox.
  • khalic 1 hour ago
    I still get nightmares from SOAP…
  • guillermofc 4 hours ago
    Spain's cadastre (the official property registry for land/buildings data) has a free public API. The catch: it's SOAP/.asmx-era XML with three different services depending on your input (reference, coordinates, or address), four different response shapes discriminated by a counters block, business errors returned as HTTP 200 with the error inside the XML, infra errors as HTTP 500 text/plain, decimal commas ("100,000000"), and no documented rate limits or SLA.

    I wrote up everything I hit while integrating it (applies even if you never use my product): https://prediohq.com/guias/consumir-api-catastro-soap-json/

    Predio is the wrapper I built on top: one JSON contract for the three inputs, typed stable errors (404/422/402 always JSON), cache with serve-stale so the upstream's availability isn't yours, and an MCP server (Streamable HTTP) so agents can call it directly. Prepaid per-call pricing, 250 calls/month free, no subscription.

    Honest caveats: Spain only (and not the Basque Country/Navarre, which run their own foral cadastres); no ownership data (that's legally protected); if you need one lookup a month, just use the official site — I wrote a comparison that includes "when not to use us": https://prediohq.com/guias/api-catastro-comparativa/

    Happy to answer anything about wrangling government SOAP into something agents can use.

    • loloquwowndueo 53 minutes ago
      Wow even the HN intro comment is slop.

      Also - I’m a native Spanish speaker, it’s probably the first slop page in Spanish I’ve ever seen and it’s … painful. Do your users a favor and please go through it and do some human-driven copy editing. As is this is barely intelligible.

      • mejutoco 36 minutes ago
        I had to check

        > Esta guía es para cuando quieres meterla en producción

        This sounds pretty inappropriate, and a bit funny.

      • nickphx 36 minutes ago
        those honest caveats though.. lol