Indeed it does: http://wanderingbarque.com/nonintersecting/2006/11/15/the-s-...

God, I love that rant.

"I trust that the guys who wrote this have been shot." :-)

People who all run the same version of Visual Studio think SOAP is awesome. Get handed somebody else's "whiz-dull" a few times, and see how much fun it is to generate a working client using a different brand/version client stack.

I had the pleasure of writing a client for a SOAP service in a Titanium/JavaScript app not too long ago. If you don't have visual studio generating those proxy classes for you then indeed it's a huge pain.

Well, at least SOAP uses XML which has defined the basic formats. I hate that there are at least three different datetime formats in JSON and they are all used. WTF! SOAP isn't that bad if you stay away from WS- extensions

A lot of protocols and standards containing the word 'simple; aren't. Most of them, in fact! I have a suspicion that this is because these designs start as antitheses to existing complex designs. 'Aha!' say the designers. 'We won't repeat those mistakes!' But because they proceed from the same basic assumptions as the complex designs they try to replace, they always produce something complex in the end, because they never really understood simplicity.

SMTP is pretty simple I would say

Depends how many of the encoding options you want to support. http://fanf.livejournal.com/64533.html

The S in SOAP is for Simple as the L in LDAP is for lightweight

People who mock LDAP for not being lightweight have obviously never dealt with DAP.

The existence of a worse thing does not justify a bad thing.

What makes it so bad? I haven't looked at it in a while, but I don't remember having a beef with the original LDAP:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1777.txt

I think while LDAP may qualify as "lightweight" the fact it uses ASN.1 BER does, in my opinion, make it fail the "simple" test.

For what it's worth, the "lightweight" here is not an assertion that it is lightweight in an absolute sense. It's a modifier on OSI's Directory Access Protocol: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_Access_Protocol

It's hard for people to imagine now, but at the time the Internet was just one of many competing network standards. Had this been developed after the rise of the web, I'm sure it would have been a very different protocol.

LDAP was, in fact, developed after the rise of the Web. By Netscape!

(And SMTP, gopher, and finger were developed before the rise of the Web.)

Definitely not true. The first LDAP implementation was published in 1993, and was worked on for a while before that internally at the University of Michigan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Howes

The first real browser, Mosaic, was released the same year.

Eventually Howes went to Netscape, but Netscape didn't exist until 1994, and Howes didn't join them until 1996

It started out that way, but then they made all of CORBA's mistakes.

Yeah -- before the enterprise types got a hold of it, SOAP was actually fairly pleasant to work with. Sigh. Oh well.

You can kind of get a flavor of what pre-enterprise-jackassery SOAP was like to work with by looking at Dave Winer's XML-RPC (spec: http://xmlrpc.scripting.com/spec.html), which was one of the precursors of SOAP.

That's a good point - didn't CORBA also start fairly straightforward (I can't believe I said that) but then grew extra layers of mind numbing complexity for transactions, security etc. - pretty much like the various weird WS-* specifications that most people seem to ignore?

S for simple really comes apart in "SNMP".

Hmph. Having tried to use SNMP on occasion, I always assumed S was for Sinister. Or perhaps Special.

I just figured the 'S' was a shortened form of "WTF?!?"

I'll admit I can't figure how they got to 'S' from there, however.