Jeff Schneider apparently takes offense to my Service Oriented Web presentation;

Yes Mark, you can order a pizza with SOAP, with REST, with CORBA, with RMI, with EJB and more.

Don’t tell that to the designers of the WS-Splat stack. As late as 2002, I was still being told by some of them that REST based solutions required humans in the loop (and as late as this year, by a well known CTO of a public company in our industry!). Does that not concern you, that these bright folks – and they really are bright, I’m not being facetious – who much of the industry are entrusting their future architectural direction to – can make such a massive mistake? Does that not warrant further investigation, to see how that can happen, and more importantly, why it happened? Is it not in the realm of possibility that the industry has simply screwed up in a very big way?

What’s your point? The world needs REST? Let’s be clear: “REST” is unnecessary – as is all of this stuff! If we want to build our distributed systems with Sockets and EDI we could – BUT WE DON’T!

Jeff, the point of that part of the presentation was that in 1998, before SOAP came along, we already had at our disposal the largest and most successful distributed application in the history of mankind (hmm, I suppose it might have been smaller than email at the time, but worst case, second largest), and it was capable of solving pretty much all the problems that Web services were being tapped to solve. The Web just needed some extensions; some things built on top that leveraged what was beneath.

We were already well on our way with the Web, to achieving what’s now known as the “SOA vision”. Web services have set us back in that pursuit, at least six years in real time, but architecturally, decades, since they’ve disregarded – no, explicitly rejected – known best practices for large scale integration .

That’s not worth calling out? I beg to differ.

Mark – if you want to compare and contrast REST and Web services than do it right. This is crap and you know it. The funny thing is, I’m a REST fan – I just can’t stomach this one-sided bullshit.

I don’t peddle crap, Jeff. It’s a perfectly valid comparison which I stand by 100%. Sometimes issues really are black and white, and this, very regrettably, is one of them.

I would, however, be interested to know what you mean by “do it right”. Are you saying that some things are best done with REST, and others with SOA? If so, please, do tell.

P.S. Loved your shot at UDDI 8-);

The UBR was a really dumb idea and we apologize for making you sit through lectures on a service oriented yellow pages hosted in the cloud

Gee, if only they listened to me back in 2000/2001 when my startup joined on as a UDDI promoter(?) and submitted a proposal suggesting that UDDI servers become Web servers!

A bold statement from Ian Davis on his piece called “SOAP Destined to A Life of Obscurity“. He declares his suspicion that;

[…] SOAP is finally being sidelined into a niche activity.

I think that’s slowly being realized by more and more people. It’s just never fast enough for me. 8-) As I mentioned in the Q&A after my panel session at WWW2005, in response to a question about what would happen to SOAP, I observed that CORBA/OMA is still under development in the OMG right now… but who knew or cared?

And to anticipate Steve‘s reaction 8-), I’m sure what’s going on with CORBA/OMA at the OMG is very important to some folks like banks, telcom, and other LargeCos – as it has been for ages now. But that is most definitely a niche.