well yes. i agree re corba, j2ee etc. but i think there were a lot of very nice technologies around xml that enabled automatic discovery, interop, validation etc. and we have ditched them all because there was also a lot of unnecessarily complex baggage and tooling that came with the ecosystem around them.

i even thought SOAP was quite nice if you used the message oriented flavour instead of RPC flavour. REST was imo better and won out, but then nobody really does REST today and we seem to keep on re-inventing the wheel. am watching the htmx discourse with interest.