The Butt Ugly Weblog

SOAP and developer appreciation

There were reasons why I never bothered to look at SOAP: I hate standards which I cannot absorb in a single afternoon. I think this is an important thing about pickup of technology: If a techie does not understand what a technology is about in one day, he probably won't bother to recommend it to his CTO. You see, he's the one who's going to have to work with it, so he will naturally pick the one he understands, and not the one with "industry support and tons of four-letter acronyms".

I think this is something which is generally overlooked at the new technology introduction phase: Things should be easy to pick up, and not just by the end users - developers are users, too! It's just that the user interface they use is different from the interface which is exposed to the end user. And the easier it is for developers to get the basics, the faster they can work, and more reliable the end result is going to be. And, I dare say, also more usable. If the developers can spend more time worrying about the so-called presentation layer (aka the "User Interface") and less time worrying about the back end (aka "The Geeky Bits"), it's better for overall usability.

There is also the fact that (unfortunately) most programs tend to bring some of the underlying metaphors to the UI, too. If the underlying system is complicated, some of that complexity will creep towards the top of the stack as well. "We'll put it in user preferences" is a far too often heard phrase, when a developer does not quite know what he is doing.

Pete Lacey wrote a wonderful little piece called "S stands for Simple", an unique peek into what the SOAP standard is all about. It's rather funny if you've ever tried to wrap your brain around the whole SOAP/WSDL/UDDI "trinity of doom".

(Thanks to the link someone on IRC; updating client lost the logs... Sorry for incoherence, my brain is still full of snot. I hate it when I sneeze abruptly and a big chunk of goo from your throat lands right in the middle of the monitor. Don't you?)