A recent question at the REST in Practice discussion group, reminded me of the research work that Jim and I did on the SOAP Service Description Language (SSDL). It was an active time of discussions with the Web Services community. We really disliked WSDL and we really liked REST. We had come up with an architectural style called “MEST”. We wanted to demonstrate the ideas of message-orientation and declaratively description of protocols in service-oriented applications, so we came up with SSDL. A number of researchers got involved and papers were written. It was a lot of fun.

We created ssdl.org and published all the information there. Unfortunately, over the years we let the domain expire so there is no record on the Internet of the SSDL web site ever existing. The domain is now used for a completely different purpose. So, I decided to republish the contents of ssdl.org for historical reasons.

Of course the world has moved on. Since then we wrote REST in Practice, SOAP is all but irrelevant today, and we are all enjoying our professional lives by doing something different 🙂