Soap vs. Something else

"My only point of contention is Sam's statement that when you control both ends of the wire, SOAP isn't the right answer.

 

I'm not convinced...

 

...More importantly, as the supporting infrastructure for SOAP gets hardened into the (distributed and local) computing fabric, there is a lot to be gained from leveraging it. Today, this advantage isn't so obvious. Going forward, I think it will be."
[Don Box]

Don and Sam are both smart guys. I generally agree with both of them. But, tonight I have to make a choice... I am siding with Don on this one. When .NET first came out, I would have pushed remoting, but with the WS-Extensions becoming reality, lately I am realizing just how much potential SOAP has and how much cooler (even if more verbose) it is than remoting. As time goes on, I think we will see a lot of things you can do w/ SOAP that aren't readily available in the remoting infastructure (not that you couldn't build them, just that lots of cool people will build lots of cool SOAP stuff because it is the happening thing and remoting is so 1990s).