I was watching Tim Bray’s interview on InfoQ. One of  Tim’s point was – while the heavy-weights were creating protocols like CORBA and DCOM, what they were trying to do was already happening on a massive scale on the Web – millions of disparate computers talking to each other irrespective of all the other niggly parameters like OS and network speed etc.

I have been worked on ONC-RPC, DCE-RPC, Corba, DCOM, SOAP and other such “open” standards for program to program communication.

The interesting thing is that before Http I always preferred a plain vanilla Socket and now I just open an HTTP connection and send XML payloads and the interview clarified some things for me.

• Simplicity is paramount not features
• The protocol should not try to abstract things too much. e.g: Http does not try to make a network connection look like a local method call.