WS-I tried to make the WebService stack of different vendors interoperable, and actually helped a lot in making distributed systems less of a pain to implement.

WS-I tried to make the WebService stack of different vendors interoperable, and actually helped a lot in making distributed systems less of a pain to implement. REST is the new trendy kid on the block, but still has a lot of work to do to replace the WS-* standards. There is a great presentation by Sanjiva Weerawarana on REST vs SOAP (or REST vs SOA architectures)[1], and a lot of points he makes are still not addressed by REST. [1]http://www.infoq.com/presentations/sanjiva-rest-myths http://www.infoq.com/presentations/sanjiva-rest-myths