Simple Considered Harmful

SOAP and SOAP::Lite entirely reinforce my belief that any variation on "Simple" or "Lightweight" in the name of a protocol, library or other software product is to be be treated with the same suspicion as "People's" or "Democratic" in the name of a country. -- DanBarlow, from http://ww.telent.net/diary/2004/11/#16.69212

Examples include LightweightDirectoryAccessProtocol, SimpleNetworkManagementProtocol, and SimpleObjectAccessProtocol.

LDAP is indeed lightweight compared to what it replaced. Likewise for SOAP, when compared to CORBA. While neither of these things can adequately be described on a page - much of the complexity is due to complexity in the underlying problem domain.

Disagree. The complexity comes not from the problem domain, but from the misguided attempts at making the protocols robust by overspecifying. CORBA is indeed complex, but a better comparison for SOAP is XML-RPC, which truly is simple and equally capable. LDAP and SNMP both, ultimately, communicate a hierarchy of key/value pairs, and there are absolutely much simpler ways to do that. To me, these three protocols are eloquent arguments against StaticTyping, which is a holy war I hope we can avoid waging here.

See also AlarmBellPhrase