# Selling official company documents through a national media platform

> An integration that let a major Australian media platform's readers buy official company documents from ASIC, the corporate regulator, from SOAP web services to the first REST APIs. An early lesson in the cost of over-engineering.

- Client: A major Australian media platform (Media and business information)
- Role: Integration engineer, Nicolas Dao
- Status: Delivered. Early career
- Capabilities: Systems integration, API design, E-commerce
- Web page: https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/regulator-documents-integration/

## Outcomes

- Readers could find and buy official company documents from ASIC without leaving the media platform.
- Integrations across SOAP web services and early REST APIs.
- A lasting preference for simple architectures.

## The situation

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) is the corporate regulator, and it holds the official records of every Australian company: extracts, filings, registered details. Business readers want those documents, and a major media platform wanted its readers to be able to buy them on its own site.

## What I built

The integrations that made it work: searching ASIC's records, ordering and paying for documents, and delivering them to the reader, all inside the media platform. It meant working with SOAP web services, the enterprise standard of the time, alongside the first REST APIs as they emerged.

## What it taught me

Working with both side by side was an education. SOAP came with heavy contracts, generated code and layers of ceremony to send what was, in the end, a simple request. REST did the same job with a URL and some JSON. It gave me an early appreciation of simple architectures, and of how much over-engineering costs: in time, in bugs, and in how hard a system becomes to change.

## Why it matters to you

Most integrations still sit between an old system and a new one, a government or enterprise API and a modern product. I've worked on both sides of that line, and I'll always pick the simplest design that does the job.

## Built with

- SOAP
- REST APIs
- Government data integration

## Related

- [An e-commerce platform built from scratch in California](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/ecommerce-from-scratch/index.md): a related project
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