“Well, the problem is that SOAP is hard.”

It’s early 2007 and I’m dead in the middle of a conversation with a friend at PayPal.

“We were certain that developers accessing the eBay product data would want everything in SOAP and it just made sense to do it that way. It wasn’t right, though. Turns out, SOAP is hard.”

This is neither the first nor the last time I’d find myself submerged in the ‘what-counts-as-too-hard for data access?’ conversation, or the ‘so-who-are-our-users-REALLY?’ conversation that’s never too far behind. Every year sees the addition of yet more developers working in yet more languages inside of even more frameworks than ever before. And the unspoken corollary of this mass influx of new developers is that so much of what we spent our time doing before is now a thing of the past. The constant prepping and tossing around of data as XML — out of the data store, wrapped and tagged, over the network, parsed, chewed up, spit out — that characterized so much of Web 1.0 applications development is now almost completely encapsulated for today’s 2.0 or 3.0 generation of mash-up artists and developers.

And, this is probably as it should be. The question of what counts as ‘easy-to-integrate’ isn’t going anywhere. Applications development, both on the Web and in the enterprise, is now very much a question of glue: What glue do we use to glue which prebuilt components together with what other prebuilt components, and what preexisting, already-baked unit test framework do we use to lock in our results as we go? Glue is supposed to be easy to use and it only makes sense that the Web services, tools and technologies that make the cut for the next generation of developers will be the ones that don’t require poring over documentation to figure out how authentication is supposed to work.

So, how easy is easy? It turns out that SOAP is too hard (my friend at PayPal was right) for a pretty substantial chunk of enterprise employees. Cut-and-paste URLs get closer. But what about a no-brainer like email? Why can’t data — or communications services — be only a click away? A click of the ’send’ button, in fact? Email penetration sits at some enormous percentage of the enterprise, which makes it The Great Unused Channel for putting on-demand services — data, communications or otherwise — in the hands of more users. In our case, the services in question are on-demand communications services: sending an email to initiate an automatic text-to-speech out-dial to anyone, anywhere in the world, in the middle of whatever business process requires notifications or reminders. The idea of email-triggering can penetrate any number of existing business processes, helping automate chunks of work and cutting costs in a downed economy.

The easy-to-integrate bar gets lowered at least every 36 months, which is a boon to new developers. This time around let’s see if existing tools and technologies as simple as email can lower it even further.

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