SOAP Prognostication. I used to be on the SOAP bandwagon. That was back around 2000, in the days of SOAP/0.9 and its extreme simplicity. These days, it's stupidly complex and pretty much just wasting hundreds of man-years as we re-created infrastructure we already had.
Dilip pointed me to a conversation from almost 4 years ago between Mr. Brilliant Corba (Michi Henning) and Mr. Brilliant COM-turned-SOAP (Don Box). In that back and forth (which starts here), Michi made what now strikes me as a thoroughly insightful prediction in October of 1999:
By the time you've made HTTP + XML do all the things developers need for real-life systems, HTTP + XML will be just as complex [as Corba]; it's inevitable. What annoys me is that catch-cry of "look at how easy this is!", with no-one crying "yes, and did you notice how little it can do?"
If that doesn't sum up the current state of SOAP, I don't know what does.
[The .NET Guy]
