Socrates on SOAP

Two stories on web standards in imaginary dialog form.

• On SOAP: The S stands for Simple by Pete Lacey (via Blue Sky On Mars). Truly brilliant.
  
• The REST Dialogues by Duncan Cragg

Our industry moves from one stupid hype to the next. OOP, CASE, CORBA, ODBMS, Applets, push media (anyone remember "push media"?), VRML, Agents, JINI, Enterprise JavaBeans, Extreme Programming, Grid Computing, SOA, "Enterprise Service Bus".

We never learn. We're too afraid that we miss out on the Next Big Thing and our knowledge becomes obsolete. So we follow the hype. Even seemingly smart people fall victim to herd instinct. Billion dollar businesses are built on brain-dead technologies that look totally embarrassing in retrospect *cough* EJB 1-2 *cough*.

It's funny how little we learn from all this. We still believe the snake oil salesmen and are looking for the silver bullet. Heck, we're selling snake oil and silver bullets ourselves. We travel to the snake oil conferences, read and publish silver bullet books.

I think the problem is that the industry is too young and doesn't know its own history, so it can't learn from its past mistakes. Only the old people do, but no one listens to them any more. :)