Talking about XML standards

This post by Loosely Couple Thinking, informing us that the work of the OASIS WS-BPEL Technical Committee is done, reminded me of this old post by Tim Bray:

To wit: Don’t use WS-* unless you need to interoperate with existing WS-* deployments, in particular Microsoft WCF, which is the twenty-first century version of DCOM: the Windows network API they’d like you to program to.

So, no, I don’t want to tear anything down, but I also don’t want to just get along: I want to start building developer tooling around REST, or what Greg Papadopoulos calls RSWS: “Real Simple Web Services”. I think work to date on WS-* represents a sunk investment; use it when you have to (we at Sun are shipping the tooling to let Javaland talk to WCF) but not as the basis for anything new. Because the design of WS-* just has too many problems to be suitable for enterprise use, in the general case.

You would have to know more about programming than I do to judge the merits of the discussion; but I would be interested in hearing from my programmer readers.