Yeah -- before the enterprise types got a hold of it, SOAP was actually fairly pleasant to work with. Sigh. Oh well.

You can kind of get a flavor of what pre-enterprise-jackassery SOAP was like to work with by looking at Dave Winer's XML-RPC (spec: http://xmlrpc.scripting.com/spec.html), which was one of the precursors of SOAP.

That's a good point - didn't CORBA also start fairly straightforward (I can't believe I said that) but then grew extra layers of mind numbing complexity for transactions, security etc. - pretty much like the various weird WS-* specifications that most people seem to ignore?