Via Tim Bray - WS-dämmerung:

James M. Snell - Notes:

"Those who are familiar with my history with IBM should know that I was once a *major* proponent of the WS-* approach. [...] I was involved in most of the internal efforts to design and prototype nearly all of the WS-* specifications. However, over the last two years I haven’t written a single line of code that has anything to do with WS-*. The reason for this change is simple: when I was working on WS-*, I never once worked on an application that solved a real business need. Everything I wrote back then were demos. Now that I’m working for IBM’s WebAhead group, building and supporting applications that are being used by tens of thousands of my fellow IBMers, I haven’t come across a single use case where WS-* would be a suitable fit. In contrast, during that same period of time, I’ve implemented no fewer than 10 Atom Publishing Protocol implementations, have helped a number of IBM products implement Atom and Atompub support, published thousands of Atom feeds within the firewall, etc."

Dare Obasanjo - WS-* is to REST as Theory is to Practice:

"My movement towards embracing building RESTful Web services from being a WS-* advocate is based on my experiences as someone who worked on the fundamental building blocks of these technologies and then as someone who became a user of these technologies when I moved to MSN Windows Live. The seeds were probably sown when I found myself writing code to convert Microsoft’s GetTopDownloads Web service to an RSS feed because the SOAP Web service was more complicated to deal with and less useful than an RSS feed. Later on I realized that RSS was the quintessential RESTful Web service and just asking people “How many RSS feeds does Microsoft produce?” versus how many SOAP endpoints does Microsoft expose is illuminating in itself."