> I think it was the crappy auto-generated wrappers from back then that was the downfall. Both in c# and Java, there was too much magic, where they tried to hide too much and make it look like regular local function calls.
I'd expand this a bit further too: they tried to make them look like regular function calls in an age where asynchronous/callback programming in general was a nightmare.
At least in C# today, a lot of the debug pain I recall helping other developers through with the old SOAP/WSDL WCF auto-gen code would be solved with async/await. Practically no one understood the Begin{FunctionName}Async/End{FunctionName}Async pattern that the best of those wrappers used at the time and so many developers settled for synchronous blocking and deadlocking anti-patterns instead.
Which again leads to the more general problem with such things that: when they worked right they were magic, and when they didn't work they were (practically) impossible to debug.
There is something to be said that, too, that no one wanted to write a WSDL definition file or a SOAP wrapper by hand, so you were always fighting your tooling to produce what you needed and had a hard time correcting it when it did something sub-optimal.
I don't think swagger is a terribly huge step backwards as in general what I've seen of swagger is lot more descriptive than prescriptive. I've seen some swagger-described APIs that are heavily hypermedia and take a strong REST approach, and I've seen some swagger-described APIs that might as well be SOAP for as much as they resemble "proper" REST and/or hypermedia. It certainly feels more pragmatic than SOAP/WSDL, in trying to describe a lot of the variety in how people build REST-ish APIs, and maybe in that way it's a step forwards from a once-sized-fits-all prescriptive approach. (In that way it too is a step backwards in that sometimes a good prescriptive approach might lead people more easily down a "happy path" of best practices, but that's always the hard balance: pragmatism versus theoretical purity. The pendulum swings.)
This. To expand on it a little more, if you ran into a poorly define wsdl, you'd get horrible looking objects back. Some even generate ambiguous "data" objects that essentially contain an xml string you'd have to parse yourself.
I'd expand this a bit further too: they tried to make them look like regular function calls in an age where asynchronous/callback programming in general was a nightmare.
At least in C# today, a lot of the debug pain I recall helping other developers through with the old SOAP/WSDL WCF auto-gen code would be solved with async/await. Practically no one understood the Begin{FunctionName}Async/End{FunctionName}Async pattern that the best of those wrappers used at the time and so many developers settled for synchronous blocking and deadlocking anti-patterns instead.
Which again leads to the more general problem with such things that: when they worked right they were magic, and when they didn't work they were (practically) impossible to debug.
There is something to be said that, too, that no one wanted to write a WSDL definition file or a SOAP wrapper by hand, so you were always fighting your tooling to produce what you needed and had a hard time correcting it when it did something sub-optimal.
I don't think swagger is a terribly huge step backwards as in general what I've seen of swagger is lot more descriptive than prescriptive. I've seen some swagger-described APIs that are heavily hypermedia and take a strong REST approach, and I've seen some swagger-described APIs that might as well be SOAP for as much as they resemble "proper" REST and/or hypermedia. It certainly feels more pragmatic than SOAP/WSDL, in trying to describe a lot of the variety in how people build REST-ish APIs, and maybe in that way it's a step forwards from a once-sized-fits-all prescriptive approach. (In that way it too is a step backwards in that sometimes a good prescriptive approach might lead people more easily down a "happy path" of best practices, but that's always the hard balance: pragmatism versus theoretical purity. The pendulum swings.)