Bad Idea

Robert Sayre makes the point that it really is over after all...

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see it was a bad idea to try and abstract away application protocols using RPC calls tied to verbose, rigid, statically-typed languages mapped with a Rube Goldberg schema language that has a more flexible type system than said languages...

If you have Microsoft saying "well, the best approach is to make this elaborate infrastructure we've spent billions of dollars building out optional", then the debate is over.

Update: More about this bad idea. First, Tim Bray writes about either WS-angst or WS-flurry or both...

I think the WS-stench of something WS-rotting from the WS-head down is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

OK, not much information there but a telling satire on the WS-mess. But Dare Obasanjo informs us...

The main problem with WS-* interop is that vendors decided to treat it as a distributed object programming technology but based it on a data typing language (i.e. XSD) which does not map at all well with traditional object oriented programming languages. On the other hand, if you look at other XML-Web-Services-as distributed-objects technology like XML-RPC, you don't see as many issues. This is because XML-RPC was meant to map cleanly to traditional object oriented programming languages.

I think this has a ring of truth. XML-RPC for all its flaws is fairly modest and easy to implement. The data model is not unlike JSON, again really modest and easy to implement. JSON is even better because it is just a data representation and can just use plain HTTP.