When we rolled out an ERP in our Brazil subsidiary the whole internal consulting team immediately agreed to leave our brains untouched by this complexity and hire a local consultant team as help. And the local consultant team in turn immediately suggested useing a middleware provider.
This sounds similar to Ukrainian cash registers. Every retail operation goes through a cash register API on the tax agency side (because who would not love to keep some cash off the books, right), but there it is RESP+JSON and a cottage industry of services running it for you. It would not even be that hard is it wasn't sneaking the whole PKI into it.
Brazil runs the largest mandatory e-invoicing system on Earth. Every invoice, every truckload, every retail receipt in a $2T economy passes through government SOAP 1.2 webservices. In 2026.
Want to integrate? The documentation is four PDF manuals totaling over 1,000 pages, spread across different portals, with critical details that are simply not written anywhere. Two examples we paid for in hours of debugging: the freight document (CT-e) and the manifest (MDF-e) implement the same distribution spec with incompatible envelopes (one wraps the payload and requires an author state code, the other rejects that field and wants the state code in the SOAP header). And the SOAP action must travel inside the Content-Type header; send a SOAPAction header like every SOAP tutorial on the internet tells you to, and the server refuses you without explaining why.
So we mapped all 29 webservices across the 4 document models into one Postman collection: ready-to-fire envelopes, per-host mTLS certificate setup documented, and the distribution services validated against the production government endpoints, not just written from the manuals.
Where you can make it better: Brazil has 27 states and several run their own authorizer URLs (Sao Paulo's retail invoices, for one). We cover the shared authorizer plus the national environment; state-specific URL mappings are the top open contribution. The collection is generated from a Python inventory file, so a PR is a 5-line diff, not JSON surgery.
Docs in Portuguese (the devs suffering with this are Brazilian), but I'll answer anything here in English.
SOAP 1.2 strikes me as really reasonable - it's a mature format with interop to several languages and has schema validation.
The inconsistencies you describe above are probably due to each org in the government implementing the common spec independently of the others, and introducing differences without even knowing. Documentation is key here, but as with any large system, there can be gaps.
It's really cool that you mapped it all.
And kudos to Brazil for creating a common computerized platform.
What’s the rationale of all this? I mean countries have gotten (mostly) rid of black books without such systems. Maintaining such a solution must be horribly expensive and what if it goes down?
So, first up: why? Why is everything still using SOAP? I'm not talking down on Brazil, by the way. I've worked in American healthcare tech, and at some point you find yourself learning EDI to talk to insurance companies.
Maybe it's a solved problem and SOAP 1.2 is good enough for that particular job.
We _still_ use TCP/IP and it's v4 is from 1981.
edit: I once looked deep into Remote PowerShell. How it's actually built. Dear. God. XML enveloped inside XML inside another XML wrapped around HTTP. Add some certificate based encryption for the HTTP envelope and some more encryption for the Kerberos messaging inside the serialized XML wrapped in envelopes and wrappings. Now THAT'S a communication protocol. :D
The answer is probably "because SOAP was the hot new thing when they first decided to do this".
Working with enterprise software is in general a horrific experience, especially that which originated in the 90s at the peak of OOP dogma-cults and insane architecture-astronautism abstraction mixed with SOLIDly thick levels of bureaucracy.
My memories of COM, CORBA, DCE/RPC, XML, etc. are not great. Some of the stuff reads like satire today, but people were actually serious about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Management_Group (I recall an article in a physical magazine long ago which started with "The Object Management Group's Working Task Force, also known as OMGWTF...")
Sat in many meetings talking about CORBA and COM. And XML is the gift that just keeps giving. Thank god that stuff is in the rear view mirror.
However in the age of AI I don't know if it matters too much that SOAP is the interchange. It is easy enough to build clients against it. It works. It's probably quite secure. Who cares?
> especially that which originated in the 90s at the peak of OOP dogma-cults and insane architecture-astronautism abstraction mixed with SOLIDly thick levels of bureaucracy.
It's a perfectly fine protocol, with a rigid schema and mature code generation support for all relevant languages. It's not the sexiest protocol, but it gets the job done.
> mature code generation support for all relevant languages.
Heh, "relevant languages" is kind of an interesting term there. If the relevant language is Java then sure, it's fine.
Some popular modern languages (ie Go) don't have good SOAP support (yet). At least not to the point of being able to point them at WSDL/XSD specs and have everything auto-generated. :(
I think that‘s a matter of days and few hundred dollars in tokens to port it to Go if you really need it.
Porting is where AI can do a really good job with the right instructions.
It's more than just a few days of effort though. Sme of the members of my team at work have been working on adding SOAP 1.1 support. It's a significant amount of time and effort though.
It's based on XML and XML is a cursed format, because it does not cleanly separate parsing from evaluation. Because of this flaw, whatever words they want to use, it does not have real schemas, it has programs and a validator-evaluator, which performs network IO.
SOAP is terrible[1], but if the whole country is on board, change is very difficult and you're not going to move to anything simpler because it would either be too simple to actually satisfy the need or too simple to satisfy the selection comittee.
[1] The whole thing with wsdl is like an elaborate prank. Without fail, the WSDL files are impossible to obtain and don't reflect the service as deployed or documented. Documented equivalent forms will not be treated as equivalent. Two instances of a 'standard' service will not accept the same XML. And I only worked with simple SOAP services with straight forward payloads.
Unfortunately that seems like bad history. I’ve only had good experience with wsdls, internally and externally, but they were generated with the services and readily available.
It’s been a long time since I had to work in SOAP. Does https://soapy.sourceforge.net/ atill work? That would make things easier to automate if so. This is awesome work.
have there been any "here's a nicer wrapper API" services out there? Or is the complexity somewhat upstream of "real" complexity/differences in reporting.
Want to integrate? The documentation is four PDF manuals totaling over 1,000 pages, spread across different portals, with critical details that are simply not written anywhere. Two examples we paid for in hours of debugging: the freight document (CT-e) and the manifest (MDF-e) implement the same distribution spec with incompatible envelopes (one wraps the payload and requires an author state code, the other rejects that field and wants the state code in the SOAP header). And the SOAP action must travel inside the Content-Type header; send a SOAPAction header like every SOAP tutorial on the internet tells you to, and the server refuses you without explaining why.
So we mapped all 29 webservices across the 4 document models into one Postman collection: ready-to-fire envelopes, per-host mTLS certificate setup documented, and the distribution services validated against the production government endpoints, not just written from the manuals.
Where you can make it better: Brazil has 27 states and several run their own authorizer URLs (Sao Paulo's retail invoices, for one). We cover the shared authorizer plus the national environment; state-specific URL mappings are the top open contribution. The collection is generated from a Python inventory file, so a PR is a 5-line diff, not JSON surgery.
Docs in Portuguese (the devs suffering with this are Brazilian), but I'll answer anything here in English.
The inconsistencies you describe above are probably due to each org in the government implementing the common spec independently of the others, and introducing differences without even knowing. Documentation is key here, but as with any large system, there can be gaps.
It's really cool that you mapped it all.
And kudos to Brazil for creating a common computerized platform.
We _still_ use TCP/IP and it's v4 is from 1981.
edit: I once looked deep into Remote PowerShell. How it's actually built. Dear. God. XML enveloped inside XML inside another XML wrapped around HTTP. Add some certificate based encryption for the HTTP envelope and some more encryption for the Kerberos messaging inside the serialized XML wrapped in envelopes and wrappings. Now THAT'S a communication protocol. :D
That‘s the question? And not why every single invoice has to go through the government?
I would call that developers loss of focus.
Working with enterprise software is in general a horrific experience, especially that which originated in the 90s at the peak of OOP dogma-cults and insane architecture-astronautism abstraction mixed with SOLIDly thick levels of bureaucracy.
My memories of COM, CORBA, DCE/RPC, XML, etc. are not great. Some of the stuff reads like satire today, but people were actually serious about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Management_Group (I recall an article in a physical magazine long ago which started with "The Object Management Group's Working Task Force, also known as OMGWTF...")
However in the age of AI I don't know if it matters too much that SOAP is the interchange. It is easy enough to build clients against it. It works. It's probably quite secure. Who cares?
this is hacker poetry
It's a perfectly fine protocol, with a rigid schema and mature code generation support for all relevant languages. It's not the sexiest protocol, but it gets the job done.
And what are the alternatives? JSON schema?
Heh, "relevant languages" is kind of an interesting term there. If the relevant language is Java then sure, it's fine.
Some popular modern languages (ie Go) don't have good SOAP support (yet). At least not to the point of being able to point them at WSDL/XSD specs and have everything auto-generated. :(
It's more than just a few days of effort though. Sme of the members of my team at work have been working on adding SOAP 1.1 support. It's a significant amount of time and effort though.
ASN.1? It's even more mature, and the de-facto DER/BER encoding is far more efficient to generate and parse than anything XML-based.
[1] The whole thing with wsdl is like an elaborate prank. Without fail, the WSDL files are impossible to obtain and don't reflect the service as deployed or documented. Documented equivalent forms will not be treated as equivalent. Two instances of a 'standard' service will not accept the same XML. And I only worked with simple SOAP services with straight forward payloads.