Inspirational Technology

Pete Lacey has an excellent post up about why all the teeth knashing over REST vs. WS-* and W3C XML Schema vs. Relax NG doesn’t really matter within the corporate space. I’ve certainly argued about this enough to know the sad reality that he’s right … as much as I hate to admit it. No matter how much simpler things could be if we chucked the whole WS-* stack, in the corporate world nobody is listening. All they hear is what the big vendors say, and all they talk about is SOAP and WS-* and W3C XML schema and a bunch of other really complex crap that just makes people’s jobs harder.

I think it’s naive to believe that this isn’t intentional, the complexity is there because it requires tools to make it usable and it just so happens that all those vendors that corporate developers are so fond of, sell tools. It’s good for their business to make technology as complex as possible. In fact it’s my distaste for what the big vendors are doing that keeps me from leaving the startup world. In that world we pick technologies that we can actually understand and that we know will work. Simple is always better than complex, and anything that requires an expensive suite of tools to make it simple is looked at with great skepticism. It also helps that we simply can’t afford the stuff the big vendors sell, but even if we could, there is very little I would actually want to use.