Stefan has just posted an excellent WS-Standards Poster in the form of an A0 PDF. What's interests me most is how many of these things I can safely ignore. Trying to understand the intent, politics, ramifications and interdependencies of each and every one of these twigs is starting^W doing my head in!

Meanwhile over in planet simplification, Tim Bray continues with the "think of the trees" argument. For me using curl is an excellent way to debug apps, however there remains one fly in that ointment - security. My attempts to wget --debug the simplistic flickr services came to an abrupt stop when I hit authentication. The flickr approach whilst powerful, seems at least as complex as some of the WS-* specs, but with the benefits of the 'uniform interface' and reuse being quite lost. Using a bespoke library, in my case phpFlickr, rapidly became a must.

So the path to sanity for WS-* comes from profiles such as RAMP and for REST, well, some agreed up patterns of use would be nice, which is what some would argue most of these WS-* specs in-fact are.

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