Sam Ruby found A short parable on XML [via Ugo Cei]. An entertaining and insightful view on many of the issues driving people to document literal as a common base. And in the process, partially answers Ingo's question on messaging vs distributed objects.
You're right, that's a nice read! I guess we all tend to see new things by comparing them to what we already know ...
To further clarify my original intentions: I like to play devil's advocate from time to time (just ask Miguel about it ;)) and this was also what I did here. Why did I do it? Because I believe that the current ideas about using doc/literal are far from enough and because I had the impression that most people only used this term because it's en vogue right now. After posting my original question, I even received the response that the difference between distributed objects and messaging is to be found in the WSDL.
I nevertheless think that just using doc/literal formatting instead of rpc style encoding doesn't change too much. This was what i was alluding to when I talked about those two things being equal.
Instead, one would have to think differently. It's not about objects, it's not about endpoints, it's definitely not about WSDL anymore. All those things are just intermediaries when going to really scaleable and extensible message passing. You'd have to think publish-and-subscribe eventing, workflow, transformation, routing, semantically compensating transactions, security, and so on.
Only after we addressed all these points, we can really talk about living in a message based world - before, it will only be RPC - no matter if it's encoded doc/literal or not.
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