Gosling on SOAP

I had an email exchange with Sun's James Gosling on SOAP. He was the lead developer for Java at Sun for many years. There was an article on the Computer Weekly website entitled "Gosling Slams SOAP Protocol" but the quotes in the piece weren't really a slam. I wanted to find out for myself what he thinks of SOAP. DW

Gosling on SOAP 

I do recommend SOAP to developers, but in an odd way.

As a general-purpose RPC mechanism, it sucks. CORBA and RMI are better on all kinds of technical measures. If you're building both sides of the conversation, any of them is better than SOAP.

Where SOAP makes sense is when you're trying to achieve interoperability between systems built by disparate organizations. The thing that makes it worthwhile is the community effort to develop standardized schemas for common commercial utterances - like purchase orders.