Out of date before printing . . . gotta love the open source community. »

I have been disappointed with the direction web services in particular and SOA in general has gone. More and more complexity, more and more bulk. A recent comparison I did at a client site showed that the SOAP message was nearly 20K, whereas the REST message (using a much simpler XML-RPC schema) was only about 2K. In this case, the 90% bloat did not provide them with any value. It took longer to develop. The toolsets were more expensive, and the resources to engineer the solution were more costly. In fact, because of the complexity, the developers uses really did not understand what they were doing...they just followed the wizards. Bloat, complexity for little to no demonstrated value, and more costly . . . sounds like a great solution for hardware manufacturers and service companies. Wait, just how do Sun and IBM make their money? »