The whole network-standards-body circus is totally down the pan. Read, say RFC3501 (IMAP4). It's dense, terse, but you could (with a bit of thought) write an IMAP4 email client or server having read it - and not be too surprised at what any given server would throw at you.

Now look at any recent RFC ( 4000-plus). They're written in an opaque, specifying-without-informing declarative style, ensuring that you have to be a member of the right industry body to actually make use of them. And even these are clear in comparison with the OMA standards and the like, which are almost invariably badly written, and seem to be generated without any thought for the nature of the implementation. I challenge anyone, for example, to generate a valid GSM-SMS TPDU that contains a WAP push packet correctly, just by reading the specs.

Us poor buggers who have to actually deliver product are left scratching our heads until a Big Boy (Nokia, Microsoft etc) implement something, whereupon we just duplicate their bugs.

Sigh.

One of the fundamental changes in SOAP 1.2 is that SOAP is no longer acronym, so SOAP is no longer "simple"

Ah... and this comes about 3 weeks after I found out that one of the Web Services we have to call from another business is not welcome in the new WS thingy that comes with NetBeans. I am only told "rpc/encoded not supported", some forums say "use document/literal" or JAX-RPC... which Netbeans doesn't let me use anymore. Fortunately, we're using Weblogic 8.1, which does accept rpc/encoded and generated my "proxy classes" there.

But that ugly experience, along with others (ever tried to pass any object that *isn't* a String, Boolean, or Integer?) have really put me thinking on what kind of drugs the WS-* folks are taking, because it seems that every new standard iteration breaks what was perfectly working before. I still remember once having so much trouble I ditched the entire SOAP and WS stacks and set up my "webservice" by hand. (Ok, I did still use a standard XML parser.)

Because, you know, the whole point behind Web Services was "seamless interoperability between heterogeneous platforms" like say ... J2EE and .NET ... or PHP, or (god forbid) Ruby. I'm supposed to be able to "point-and-click" my way to call the thing and not worry about SOAP, UDDI, HTTP or whatever, as the "contract" is given in the WSDL.

Yeah, right.