Along with a significant minority of developers, I never believed that SOAP and WS-* based Web Services were going to be a practical way of constructing loosely-coupled, Internet-scale distributed applications—let alone the architectural answer to everything. (Hint: once people begin discussing the notion that human-readability and -writability are unnecessary as long as there is “adequate tool support”, you know the technology is a big fat expensive dead end.) Now I guess it’s official: WOA is the new SOA.
I have to agree with Tim Bray:
I think we should take the “Web Services” label into the jailyard, strap on a blindfold, give it a last cigarette, and shoot it. It doesn’t mean much any more, and to the extent that it does, it’s misleading: WS-* doesn’t have much of the Web about it.
Long live the Web-style.