"NATs are the reason REST won over CORBA et al." CORBA "et al" lost because they are fragile, not because of network issues. SOAP, for instance, is no more di

"NATs are the reason REST won over CORBA et al." CORBA "et al" lost because they are fragile, not because of network issues. SOAP, for instance, is no more difficult from a connectivity perspective than REST; it rides on the same TCP/HTTP rails as REST. Yet hardly anyone, given the choice, will choose SOAP today. Not that REST (really just HTTP APIs, mostly) is all that robust; it just asks far less of everyone involved to specify, coordinate and troubleshoot. You can hit an endpoint with your browser, pop open the browser developer tools and figure out what is going on. That _easy of use_, which CORBA, SOAP, "et al" completely forego, lowers cost, speeds development and causes an order of magnitude less nausea for developers. The market has proven the value of these benefits, despite what holdouts wish to believe.