well yes. i agree re corba, j2ee etc. but i think there were a lot of very nice technologies around xml that enabled automatic discovery, interop, validation etc. and we have ditched them all because there was also a lot of unnecessarily complex baggage and tooling that came with the ecosystem around them.
i even thought SOAP was quite nice if you used the message oriented flavour instead of RPC flavour. REST was imo better and won out, but then nobody really does REST today and we seem to keep on re-inventing the wheel. am watching the htmx discourse with interest.
I was at IBM during peak SOAP. It was crazy how much business pushed for abstraction for abstractions sake in this domain. I'm really hoping htmx helps people get their heads on straight with REST. All these scores of devs have been writing `POST /item {"method":"replace","id":12}` or `POST /item {"method":"delete","id":12}` for decades now.
yeah. RPC masquerading as REST is what people do now.
if your web service had a truly RESTful design then all you would need to do is point something like postman (or a browser) at it and it would be able to automagically figure out the whole set of available resources and interactions instead of having to use all this crazy swagger/OpenAPI stuff. there's a whole cottage industry around this api stuff rn.
i guess this is what happens when you put "programmers" in charge of a hypermedia system. everything becomes an RPC and nothing is standardised.
i even thought SOAP was quite nice if you used the message oriented flavour instead of RPC flavour. REST was imo better and won out, but then nobody really does REST today and we seem to keep on re-inventing the wheel. am watching the htmx discourse with interest.