Today’s WTF is provided courtesy of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC):

At last week’s OGC Technical Committee meetings, there was considerable discussion related to developing standard guidance (and rules) for implementing SOAP/WSDL and RESTful bindings for OGC Web Service interface standards. The result of this activity will be a new OGC document that defines a consistent method for using SOAP/WSDL with current and future OGC web service standard.

Ah – takes me back to the good old days of my misguided youth. At least I had the sense to argue that SOAP RPC style web services were stupid (you know a spec is confused when it supports both an RPC style and a literal style). But instead of spilling any more ink on this tired old debate, I’ll just ask a question. Can anyone point out a successful SOAP/WSDL service?

A Glimmer of Light

But at least there is hope. While one committee frivolously wastes time and money writing specs no one will ever use, a new subcommittee gets to go battle with the REST dragons:

At the same time, the members felt that REST is also a highly important method. Therefore, we are forming a new OGC Sub-committee to develop similar guidance and recommendations for implementing OGC standards in a RESTful environment. They are to provide an initial report by the Boulder meetings this September. Will be interesting to see what results and what the potential impacts are to the existing OGC web service standards.

I wait with bated breath.