The Ancient Art of Programming

There is an excellent interview with Ted Neward over on TheServerSide. I must say that I agree with him wholeheartedly. My favorite bit is near the end, when he talks about Web service magic pixie dust:

I think probably what we need to do is we need to get developers who are building web services to accept that this isn’t RPC. […] I have to go to each of the vendors and I have to beat them over the head with a two-by-four to stop making Web services look like RPC calls [but] unfortunately, because these guys make money off of tools, they need to build stuff that is tool oriented.

For example, [when using] Microsoft […] I annotate it with a special annotation […] and lo and behold it’s a Web service. EJB 2.1 does the same thing with web services. JSR181 wants to do the same thing. Start from your code, just sprinkle some Web service magic pixie dust on it and lo and behold you have a web service, bad things, bad, bad, bad, bad. I need to beat the vendors over the head to stop doing that, to instead make tools, build tools that want to look at and see and recognize that:

• this is a message,
and
• it’s in XML,

because wanting to take your code and seamlessly turning it into objects and back again, […] that’s just not going to work. It’s not going to happen.