intertwingly

Tim Ewald: Clemens and I disagree on the importance of angle-brackets

• Sam Ruby: If you ever are in a position where you can control both ends of the wire... There are much better protocols than SOAP
• Translation: I mostly agree with Tim.  However, the nice thing that SOAP does is that it forces people who, for whatever reason, are more comfortable with RPC as opposed to message exchange as a design to actually produce something that is sent across the wire that reasonably can be interpreted as a document.  In the final analysis, that's not such a bad outcome.

Radovan Janecek: Since now, I will be pointing to Sam's presentation every time anybody will be ranting about WS-* complexity compared to nice and simple XML/HTTP to me..

• Dare Obasanjo: But when your plan is to reach as many parties as possible one should favor simpler Web services technologies like plain old SOAP or just plain old XML (aka POX).
• Translation: there is a flip side to this discussion.  I've touched on that too: Reality is Corrosive and REST + SOAP.  It is worth noting, however, that I don't believe that there is such a thing as Plain Old XML (POX) - in reality there are only flavors of something called the infoset that people really deal with. By the way, Radovan, thanks for the compliment!
• Patrick Logan also picked up on one of my favorite quotables from that talk.  As I intended the slides to be ones that I talk to as opposed to read from, I am impressed by anybody who has gotten any value from them online.

What the REST vs SOAP and Doc vs RPC debates miss is the subtle point at which systems become multi-celular.  At some point, evolution stopped producing organisms consisting of every bigger and bigger cells, and started producing organisms consisting of multiple differentiated cells.  These cells communicate exclusively via message passing.  They have a significant distrust of messages that they receive.  However, once inside the cell well, things are trusted.  The analogy to biological viruses and computer viruses is an apt one.

More on this in Neurotransmitters.

And all of this is fodder for my upcoming ETech talk.