On WS-xxx, CORBA, and DCOM

After demonstrating the simplicity of CORBA under Smalltalk, James writes...

The main reason that WS* is succeeding where CORBA failed? Port 80

I would agree that WS-xxx succeeded in capturing the imagination of the industry because of port 80. I am not sure WS-xxx could be considered a technical success at all yet. (If you think it is, then I'd like to see the list of success stories to judge for myself.)

I'm not crazy about CORBA, but implementations were getting good performance, less expensive, and open sourced before WS-xxx came along. (Note that IIOP did not come along until late in CORBA's history.) There is no reason CORBA could not have worked on port 80. WS-xxx is simply a more successful (broader) diversion than DCOM, because technically DCOM was even worse. As Don Box pointed out, would have been hell to get running on Unix. (They tried.)

But WS-xxx has a long way to go to be a technical or industry success.