In my last entry, I shared an opinion on why HP scientists Loughran and Smith should revamp a little bit their paper, called "Rethinking the Java SOAP stack". Believe me Steve, my intention was not to be brutal as you seem to imply. If this was the case, I could have been much more caustic, trust me on this. I apologize if you interpreted my thought sharing as such. My intention was just to provide an overall view of the different opinions about potential solutions for fixing the problems at hand and to explicitly state that there is no white or black solution for dealing with the kind of issues you are tackling.

Looking at your example, I admit that I can read your XML document and understand it pretty well. But the problem you mention, i.e. the fact that machine-generated XML files are not human-readable, is neither a problem of JAX-RPC nor any other high-level technology that uses XML as its underlying wire format. The problems comes from the way these generators have been implemented and the way they have been instructed to spit out XML. It's not a technology problem as you seem to imply, it's an implementation problem. The technology in itself is not bad, but maybe not enough time has been invested on implementing it as it is too often the case in this world whose main concerns are ultra-short time-to-market and ultra-high productivity.

So what you propose is to get rid of those generators because they are not flexible and configurable enough and to do the job ourselves by hand. Well, I admit you have put the fingers where it hurts and you get the point. But this does not mean that we have to restart all over again. The way I see the Alpine solution today is very much similar to "Do not pass Go, do not collect 200". Why would I be happy to have to hand code the communication payload for all my messages? Personally, I think that my neurons are much better served for solving my customers' real business concerns, which cost them tons of dollars instead of perpetually reinventing a 50-years-old wheel that has been rolling its way quite acceptably for the last couple of years.

As you say, resistance is good because it means that your stuff is being read. I can't agree more as we can only ameliorate what exists, so one has to start somewhere and build upon the constructive critics people care to share. I'd be happy to see where Alpine is headed. The only thing I can say right now is that I just hope that you are not headed towards the "Alps" in the picture you provided because unless the picture has been taken from the Italian side those are not the right Alps. The only genuine Alps I know of are the Alps I'm living in here in Switzerland and I can assure you that I very much like them. And regarding my name, rest assured that I'm not a big fan of anonymity. Val is just how people I know usually call me, and my real name is Valentin Crettaz :) I'm happy the presentations are done now.