What a MEST

On Interoperability and Tim Ewald's 3 Web Services Stacks "Replacing a world of distributed applications written with DCOM, CORBA, Java RMI, etc with one where they are written using the WS-* protocols is a step in the right direction. I completely agree that it leads to better interoperability across technologies produced by the big vendors who are using incompatible technologies today.

But when your plan is to reach as many parties as possible one should favor simpler Web services technologies like plain old SOAP or just plain old XML (aka POX). Plain old XML doesn't necessarily mean following the principles of REST either."

Intersecting XML threads "What the REST vs SOAP and Doc vs RPC debates miss is the subtle point at which systems become multi-celular. At some point, evolution stopped producing organisms consisting of every bigger and bigger cells, and started producing organisms consisting of multiple differentiated cells. These cells communicate exclusively via message passing."

MEST is already omni-present, if you look for it "As far as I can tell, the basic idea behind MEST is that web services developers should be thinking about message passing instead of RPC calls. I completely agree. But I disagree with the idea that that means there should be one WSDL interface with one operation “ProcessMessage”. There's no need to go there, because we're there already."

Some of the earlier MEST postings were covered in "MEST Architecture".