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"complexity merchants" - I love this term. It aptly describes beneficiaries of earlier IT fads. Remember UML? Remember WS-*? One could come up with a long list of technologies that were a bonanza for billing consultant hours but no so great for getting to solutions.

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I remember architecture astronauts.

The debacle that was J2EE is hard to top (but I'm sure some have!). I still have battle scars from OSGi.

CORBA belongs there. And perhaps even the semantic web stuff. Definitely XML!

SOAP, don't forget SOAP.

SOAP is great when it works. Ingest a WSDL file and boom you've got an API client.

And it almost never works if you use different frameworks.

Heh, lot of emphasis on "when it works".

To be fair - J2EE (and its associated technologies like SOAP, XML) is a bit like alcohol. It is great when used in moderation, but gives you headaches when used excessively.

XML is great - if you don't believe it, then you might be interested in the pains of parsing JSON: http://seriot.ch/projects/parsing_json.html And don't get me started on YAML...

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