CORBA and SOAP

SOAP is Microsofts second approach (after DCOM) to replace Corba. This time they may succeed, because lot's of companies support it, and lot's of developers believe it's so simple to write distributed applications using SOAP, because it's only XML after all.

Maybe it is not so ironic that just as CORBA was reaching a reasonable level of maturity (including viable open-source implementations), XML-RPC mutated into SOAP and took on a lot more baggage than I believe was originally intended. The CORBA-ish aspects of SOAP will take *years* to mature in terms of the number of usable, interoperable implementations, as well as in terms of well-known, reliable patterns of application usage.

I believe CORBA was more complex than necessary for 80 percent of the use cases. The collection of SOAP-related specifications are even more complex and less proven.

SOAP is inevitable though. I suspect simpler usage models would emerge if the standards committees and large vendors would step aside and let developers compete for real solutions.