Dave Winer

f you ask Dave Winer about Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), he's almost dismissive. "Oh, that was so long ago," he says.

The first SOAP development work may have been done in the early part of this century, but it's become a cornerstone of Web services interoperability. Winer may have moved on, but the rest of the industry is busily embracing the spec he helped launch,along with Don Box, now at Microsoft, and a few others.

Near-universal agreement on the SOAP and WS-I interoperability specs endorsed by Microsoft, IBM, Sun, BEA Systems and others will enable direct connections between applications,a major advancement for the software industry, says David Chappell, owner of Chappell & Associates, a San Francisco-based consultancy.

This unanimity "will create the same kind of connectivity among applications that TCP did for machines. SOAP is the TCP/IP of applications," Chappell adds.

Winer, an alumnus of the Bronx High School of Science, is one of the Web's most ardent and long-running bloggers. Plus, he authored the RSS 2.0 and RSS 0.92 specifications. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is used to syndicate blogs and other Web content. Today, Winer is busy trying to organize Web logs at Harvard as well as his own Web log, "Scripting News."