Oh, not Oooh
Critical Section gets to the heart of the matter:
If you look at any technology which targets developers, the adoption rate and ultimate adoption percentage are a function of how easy it was. HTML was easy, the adoption rate and percentage were very high. Java was pretty easy, and the early adoption was good, but J2EE is not easy and the later adoption has not been that good. (Many more people program in Java than build applications using J2EE architecture.) COM was not easy. COM+ was not easy. DCOM was not easy. So far I have not found .NET to be easy, in fact even just understanding what it is was hard, let alone how you use it. MS does not have a history of making things easy, and this has hurt them. The things MS did which were easy were the most successful " look at VB, for example.
That's a very good point - so long as yo also understand that easy often translates to familiar - no one with any sense would say that Java is easier than Smalltalk (in an objective sense) - but given the large body of C/C++ knowledge, it sure was more familiar. In passing, he makes a comment about Atom vs. RSS in ths regard:
In the blogging world, Movable Type is easy. RSS is easy. XML-RPC is easy. Meanwhile RDF and SOAP are not easy, and nobody uses RDF and SOAP. This Atom thing is going to die a quick death from lack of adoption, because the guys behind it are nerds who don't understand easy. Dave Winer understands easy, it is his biggest virtue.
That cuts right through all the bs you see in the blogging world and puts things in perspective. Watch the Atom group not get it - loudly
Comments
SOAP Difficult?
[Alex Peake] September 22, 2003 11:08:12.174
I do not understand your statement that SOAP is difficult. We learned and implemented within a couple of days. We have had it running successfully for two years.
Here is a snippet of Visual Basic to send a SOAP message. (Receiving is quite as simple.)\
Set oSoapClient = New SoapClient oSoapClient.mssoapinit "[http://test.soapsite.com.wsdl",>http://test.soapsite.com.wsdl",] "", "", "[http://test.soapsite.com..wsml">http://test.soapsite.com..wsml"] oSoapClient.ConnectorProperty("Timeout") = 100000 'milliseconds Dim list As IXMLDOMNodeList Set list = ConvertTextToXML() Set retList = oSoapClient.PlaceOrder(list) Private Function ConvertTextToXML() As IXMLDOMNodeList Dim Dom0 As New DOMDocument30 Dim list As IXMLDOMNodeList Dim Elm As IXMLDOMElement Dim msPLaceOrderXML As String msPlaceOrderXML = "" & _ "" & _
"" & _
"168 " & _
"2180 " & _
"" & _
"B " & _
"Peake " & _
"565 Sinclair Road " & _
"MILPITAS " & _
" " & _
"" & _
"Bulk " & _
"Order: 123456 " & _
" " & _
"" & _
"SOAP001 " & _
"2 " & _
" " & _
" " & _
" "
Dom0.async = False
Dom0.loadXML msPLaceOrderXML
Set list = Dom0.documentElement.childNodes
Set ConvertTextToXML = list
End Function
SOAP Difficult?
[] September 22, 2003 11:08:54.569
SOAP Difficult?
[Alex Peake] September 22, 2003 11:12:17.721
Oops! Messed up the HTML encoding of < and > in the XML
Re: SOAP Difficult?
[James Robertson] September 22, 2003 12:10:35.630
Comment on SOAP Difficult? by James Robertson
It wasn't my assertion directly that SOAP is difficult; certainly in Smalltalk doing a client hookup is trivial, and server creation is not hard. On the other hand, it's no simpler than CORBA was (at least in Smalltalk), and a whole lot slower...