Yes absolutely: this very magic is precisely what is so horrible and imho a rabbithole of insanity. It is CORBA resurrected with XML. In my data oriented mind,

Yes absolutely: this very magic is precisely what is so horrible and imho a rabbithole of insanity. It is CORBA resurrected with XML. In my data oriented mind, the primary thing that matters is the data that is sent, the second is other semantics like idempotency. Neither SOAP nor XML solve or helps: there might be no wsdl bindings in your language, or they are badly implemented (true in my experience). XML make people nest structures where it could have been flatter, SOAP even more, and annotates everything whithout a need for that. This cost for no reason but to entertain the CORBA like pipe dream, or should I say nightmare. We just resorted to pulling out data from xml with xpath. And more or less template the response back, no wsdl and very simple. But why inflict this pain on your API users?