Web Things, by Mark Baker

Uche writes;

But putting the misery of these experiences aside, I’m surprised at how little I’ve had to worry about SOAP. As it became clear to me that Web Services were becoming a menace to much of the goodness wrought by XML, I worried that I would be forced to do a lot of gritting my teeth at work while I accommodated clients’ insistence on WS. This hasn’t turned out to be the case. In several cases where WS “end points” have been suggested, I’ve been surprised at how easily my suggestions of a REST-like alternative are embraced (the fact that I could usually whip up running code in hours helped a lot).

That’s what I’m seeing too, at least once you’re in the door (though for a pretty small sample space of two clients). On the other hand, looking for cool large scale distributed systems work has becoming extremely painful since Web services came onto the scene. Most projects are asking for “SOAP/WSDL/UDDI experience”, which leaves me either having to lie and say “Oh yes, I’ve got lots” (which I won’t do, of course), or else I have to put a pleasant face on WS-Insanity and brave the inevitable lack of interest, as I did in my resume;

He believes that, for the foreseeable future, the bulk of innovation in Internet scale systems will occur via additional architectural constraints applied to the Web; for example the Semantic Web, or the Two Way Web. Unfortunately, these beliefs also indicate to him that Web services have some serious architectural flaws that make their suitability as a large scale integration solution questionable. As a result, he spends considerable amounts of time working within standards setting organizations to ensure that these specifications – including SOAP 1.2 – take maximal advantage of the Web.