[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why did COM/SOAP/other protocols fail?
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Ask HN: Why did COM/SOAP/other protocols fail?
Hi! With the recent buzz around MCP, it made me think about what
I've read about other unifying protocol attempts in the past. Why
did these 2000s era interoperability protocols fail, and what does
MCP do different? Was it a matter of security issues in a newly
networked world? A matter of bad design? A matter of being too
calcified? I would love to hear from those who were around that
time.
Author : smj-edison
Score : 10 points
Date : 2025-10-03 15:54 UTC (7 hours ago)
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| SOAP lost to JSON because JSON was easier to handle in a browser
| or a shell script.
| nine_k wrote:
| A parallel to JSON would be XML here.
|
| A parallel to SOAP would be hypermedia and OpenAPI, which allow
| to dynamically discover the API by a remote call, and generate
| a matching set of request and response data structures to
| interact with that API.
|
| SOAP was actually pretty cool, if a bit heavyweight. It's still
| very much alive in the corporate .NET world.
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| There definitely is a simplicity in that I don't actually
| need to use OpenAPI to generate data structures and can
| quickly just do a JSON.parse and easily get to the field I
| want. With SOAP, you either generate a client or do some
| quite annoying walking of the XML tree. The hurdle for quick
| and dirty parsing is a lot higher with SOAP.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| In the world I'm living in, corporate IT, there's a ton of COM
| and SOAP. I don't see COM running across the Internet (other than
| thru VPN tunnels), but I see a ton of SOAP for interop with
| third-party interfaces. Pretty much any of the "enterprise" Java-
| based apps I work adjacent to have SOAP-based interfaces.
|
| COM is alive and well in the LAN space, too. I see it in
| industrial automation under the guise of OPC, fairly frequently,
| too.
| nine_k wrote:
| Also, providing and consuming a basic COM interface is quite
| easy with Miscrosoft's development tools. This is not true in
| other ecosystems.
|
| So COM did not fail as a standard, it just failed to conquer
| the whole world. It's doing fine though in its natural habitat.
| smj-edison wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your experience. I am just now realizing
| that just because I don't hear about SOAP very often doesn't
| mean it isn't still around.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| Re: COM: I'd say it really depends on how you define "fail." I'm
| going to suggest that you're asking why it does not come up with
| most developers on a day-to-day basis.
|
| I say this because COM and DCOM are very much alive in the
| Windows ecosystem, underlying WinRT, which underlies the object-
| oriented APIs for modern Windows apps.
| dustrider wrote:
| You should throw in CORBA from the 90s for completeness.
|
| My view mostly it was a confluence of poor dev experience and
| over-engineering that killed them.
|
| Some of those protocols were well designed. Some were secure, all
| were pretty awful to implement.
|
| It's worthwhile calling out REST as a long term success. Mainly
| because it was simple and flexible.
|
| Whether MCP will have that staying power I dunno, personally I
| think it still has some flaws, and the implementation quality is
| all over the shop. Some of the things that make it easy (studio)
| also create its biggest flaws.
| jen20 wrote:
| > It's worthwhile calling out REST as a long term success.
| Mainly because it was simple and flexible.
|
| To be fair, REST as described in the Fielding paper is rare to
| come across - the success is JSON via HTTP
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| This so much, I don't think I've ever seen an API that
| matches Fielding's paper.
| mianos wrote:
| This another reason why COM and CORBA failed. A whole lot of
| people telling everyone else the way they are doing it is all
| wrong and their 'proper' way is the only way. Maybe proto
| became popular because google didn't actually care that much.
| I remember the ACE/Tao people who did a lot of work around
| CORBA. They did good stuff but such painful religious fervor
| vibed everyone out.
| dole wrote:
| Security was a pain to implement and easy to punch holes through.
| Unregistering, updating, reregistering libraries across remote
| sites sucked unless you had a good method, which we didn't.
| aristofun wrote:
| Same reason most of the dev tools fail sooner or later:
| overengineering
| shallichange wrote:
| Because they were complex shit made for elitist purist morons.
|
| Simple is beautiful.
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