Comment by Multicomp

WSDL - now that's a name I've not heard in a very long time!

XML Web Services were awesome, but the SOAP and XML (where the hard parts that should have been given some batteries included defaults) I think was too much of a boat anchor to overcome.

And then the ruby/rails wave came and made 'rest' JSON the Silicon Valley hearthrob, and WSDLs were out like yesterdays trash.

Are they still used in businesses IRL? Yes! I worked for one that has probably (probably) moved off of them by now, but as recently as 2023 there were still some bank-facing power with SOAP RPC .asmx endpoint servers.

I follow hypermedia.systems and htmx/datastar/alpine.js because I'm still trying to get back that powerful _web_ tech advancement rather than squeezing everything into the javascript client side workaround. Typescript is great, a good poor man's F# and leagues ahead of ES3 (which I dabbled in / torture LLMs with so my old retrocomputers can still do web things), but its still bringing along so much baggage that could be lighter weight for older devices AND fits the tech utopianist promise of the original web (which is half of why I play with computer stuff).