Any of it.

Before I put on my grumpy face - thanks for the links. I appreciate it and this is totaly not directed at you or any readers here.

That said - whats different about this hype wave vs B2B exchanges, the semantic web, CORBA, OO code reuse, 4GLs, etc....

The writers act like XML and SOAP (which is an appallingly bad pair of technologies) is suddenly going to make a lot of effort writing code go away. The FACT of the matter is that it takes no less (and with all the UDDI crap and added complexity I'll say it takes a bit more) work to implement a "web service" than it does to implement it as a CORBA service, an RPC, an email message handler, or directly callable interface. Its still going to take work and the directory stuff doesn't help much at all.

Its still going to require human relationships and phone calls to make this stuff work reliably. Heck, after spending last year building Cacheon's J2EE application porting workbench, I've found that given two XML documents that are specified off the same standard, stupid little quirks like whether there was a linefeed as the last character or not made interoperability as unrealizable as a wet dream for a eunuch.

In fact, of the SOAP implementations out there, precious few work reliably together and many A-B interfaces will require bits of manual tweaking to get them set up. Truly a plug and pray world.

Additionally, the only variant of SOAP that doesn't completely suck is SOAP with attachments (which practially nobody implements) - should you disagree, try building a web service which takes an html docment and runs tidy on it and get back to me. Inlining HTML into XML is FUGLY.

I could go on and on about how XML is neither a good markup language (what it claims to be) nor a good structured data serialization format (what its mostly used for) or about how SOAP took a perfectly simple idea and obfuscated the hell out of it with weird concepts like soap envelopes, headers, bodies, pluggable serialization schemes when nobody can even get the one working, or about how watching the web services crowd repeat the entire learning process in the zippies that the OMG did in the 90's (next we add security, then transactions, then...) but I think I've said enough.

The reason the web services seminar is heavily attended is that everybody in the bay area is out of work, has nothing better to do, and is grasping at straws looking for the next big fad to fuel a new round of VC idiocy. Webservices has been a slow starter though and frankly I think there will be some services created - but its not making my heart beat any faster because I just can't get excited about redoing the 90's in XML.

Also, it sure would be great if someone could figure out a better example than the stupid stock quote or trader example. It makes me yawn everytime I see it.

Interop with other SOAP toolkits is going to come dear I think.

But we'll see. I have to do some interop with external vendors and I'll certainly define some standard interfaces and give it a go. But I'm not at all optimistic that it will be any better than homegrown message formats over http.