Bill de hOra comments on WSFED and WS-*:

I found myself strangely unmoved, unsurprised, unshocked, unconcerned [by the criticism]. I saw that a firestorm has not been lit across weblogs, as would have been the case not even a year ago. It seems that no-one cares anymore, and WSFED will be consigned to irrelevance and along with it, much of the promotion around WS-*. WS-* as a process, as a technical means designing systems , as a way to generate ‘future business value’ now lacks credibility.

I largely agree – people don’t care anymore. At least I don’t. It’s sad in a way – I had such high hopes for Web services back when it started.

It is important to note, however, that real people are quietly doing real work with SOAP and a few of the related technologies. It’s not going away – in fact, I’d say there is more adoption now than at the height of the hype. At this point the distinction seems to be between those who prefer a tool to generate their RPC wrapper (SOAP+WSDL) and those who are willing to roll their own (REST, JSON, etc). Perhaps WADL will even out the score there. SOAP also has a more “enterprisy” feel to it while REST is more “mashupy”. I think the distinction is more psychological than technological, but it’s there.