Remembering the Future

via Adam Bosworth's Weblog SOA relies on people understanding that what matters is the wire format they receive/return, not their code. Automatic proxies in this sense are dangerous and honestly if someone can show me that REST could eliminate the hideous complexity of WSDL and the horror that is SOAP section 5, that alone might make me a convert. Interestingly, if you do believe that programmers should understand the wire format because it is the contract, then one could argue that ASP.NET's use of Forms and the enormous amount of HTML it hides from programmers is a big mistake. But I'm already deep into one digression so I'll leave that thought for others. In either case, there is a basic point here that really resonates with me. If there is always a URL to a resource, then they can much more easily be aggregated, reused, assembled, displayed, and managed by others because they are so easy to share.