Dave Winer says;
SOAP and XML-RPC were started to make it easy to build applications that viewed the Internet as if it were a LAN.
which is 100% true, and at the same time, 100% the wrong thing to do. The Internet is not a LAN. On a LAN, there’s one administrative/trust domain, and on the Internet there’s, well, a whole lot more than one. Computing in those two domains – LAN and Internet – is not the same thing, and therefore requires different solutions (though arguably it could be said that the LAN is a special case of the Internet, where number of trust domains = 1, so what works for the Internet could also work on a LAN – but the converse obviously doesn’t hold).
And for the record Dave, I write software, thank you very much (and so does Paul). Not as much as I used to, but I still do, and still enjoy it (especially now that I’ve switched to Python from Java). It’s all too easy to put down a detractor rather than trying to understand what they have to say, I suppose.
no comment until now