SOAP itself was Microsoft's attempt to wrest momentum away from Java, and get people to pay attention to .NET, which modestly succeeded.
It also was a the final turd that broke bullshit mountain's forces: ultimately, developers had to figure out what mattered more to the Web's success: was it tagged data (HTML/XML), and we could preserve this distributed component/object conceptual model? Or was it the combination of URI+HTTP with its uniform interface and hypermedia? The REST debate took a long time (through 2007) to answer that, even though in practice with JSON we just pretend to adopt the full architecture.
I think the next revolution in REST would be if a new media type and associated toolkits/libraries come out that helps people build simpler and evolvable systems than JSON does. There are a variety of experiments out there, but as you imply, it's hard work.
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I concur.
SOAP itself was Microsoft's attempt to wrest momentum away from Java, and get people to pay attention to .NET, which modestly succeeded.
It also was a the final turd that broke bullshit mountain's forces: ultimately, developers had to figure out what mattered more to the Web's success: was it tagged data (HTML/XML), and we could preserve this distributed component/object conceptual model? Or was it the combination of URI+HTTP with its uniform interface and hypermedia? The REST debate took a long time (through 2007) to answer that, even though in practice with JSON we just pretend to adopt the full architecture.
I think the next revolution in REST would be if a new media type and associated toolkits/libraries come out that helps people build simpler and evolvable systems than JSON does. There are a variety of experiments out there, but as you imply, it's hard work.