A few months ago, I was stuck integrating a client’s platform with this ancient SOAP API. I'm not even kidding, the documentation looked like it was hosted on a GeoCities page from 2004.

To be fair, the API actually worked, but it threw a massive wrench into our stack. Our Laravel backend, the frontend, the mobile apps—literally everything we built—speaks fluent JSON. Meanwhile, this legacy behemoth kept spitting out payloads that looked like this:

<User>

<Id>101</Id>

<Name>John Doe</Name>