Origins of the WS stack

Mark is right on the money:


Web services were created because it was felt that Web architecture wasn't sufficient to integrate disparate applications together over the Internet. Actually, that's not quite right. The explanation that seems to better reflect reality is that the Web was never considered as a platform suitable for meeting the objectives of Web services, as can be demonstrated by the numerous articles talking about how Web services evolved from the likes of CORBA, DCOM, RMI, etc.., without mentioning the Web!! The Web just didn't resemble what folks knew a distributed computing solution to look like, so it just never registered in the heads to consider it.

The guys who built SOAP, meaning Don Box principally, were DCOM guys solving problems in distributed objects. Mark's post prompted me to revisit the old DCOM list. Here's a great post from Don in 1998 reasoning that XML's "self-describing" nature would address the type problems DCOM had. Ah, yes. ITypeInfo was an interface you could expose on an object describing its methods and properties. I think it was hard to use it sensibly for multiple interfaces on an object. Since it was parameterized by a type library description that was installed on the client computer, I guess it was also fragile if you changed the interfaces of the server object. That all seems... so... far... away now.

A parallel trend was to overload port 80 and tunnel DCOM through it, since port 80 was perceived to be "open" everywhere. That was a nifty trick that wasn't very useful, since you had to persuade your firewall to permit garbage to come over port 80 (by tricking it into believing the garbage was SSL).

All we really wanted was DCOM over the Internet.

Those two trends, self describing RPC payloads and leveraging the web, came together as SOAP.