Very much still around... and one of those "this (the terminal tool the HN post is about) might have some trademark challenges" given that every license of TOAD (Tool for Oracle Development) is bundled with some AI and the likelihood of confusion and overlap is quite real. ... and Quest really likes putting that ® after every mention of it.
SOAP was actually pretty easy to use, once it settled out.
For the most part, everyone used some kind of SDK that translated WSDL (Web Services Description Language) specifications to their chosen language.
So you could define almost any function - like PostBlog(Blog blog), and then publish it as a WSDL interface to be consumed by a client. We could have a Java server, with a C# client, and it more or less just worked.
We used it with things like signatures, so the data in the message wasn't tampered with.
Why did it stop getting popular? It probably really started to fall out of favor when Java/C# stopped being some of the more popular programming languages for web development, and PHP and Ruby got a lot more momentum.
The idea was that REST/JSON interfaces would be easier to understand, as we would have a hypermedia interface. There was sort of an attempt to make a RESTy interface work with XML, called WebDAV, that Microsoft Office supported for a while, but it was pretty hard to work with.
I've got some old SOAP code from 2001 here at the bottom of this article:
I saw "To Fly!" for the first time at the Smithsonian Air and Space Dulles location (Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center) on their IMAX screen two years ago. Definitely a film of its moment, and I can see how that influenced future science film documentaries.
My dad worked for Spitz doing Omnimax installations and planetariums, but I don't know any of the details. I would assume this was probably the late 70s or early 80s.
I'm having the LLM work with human-readable behaviors for each component. You can have the LLM take those behaviors and create a Mermaid diagram, for instance.
San Francisco is both a city and a county, unlike San Jose. In addition, you can't directly compare municipal budgets without taking into account enterprise departments that are meant to be revenue neutral, such as airports - in this case, both have an airport.
True but if you’re talking about per capita spending, the $650M for San Jose’s airport is about a billion dollars less than SF is spending on the much larger and busier SFO, so even that really skews the budgets.
I worked out of the SGI campus before it got sold to Google, and I remember the on-site cafe there was amazing. I don't know how much Google changed about it, I've never been.
As a vendor, I (well, my company) had to pay for meals at SGI, I have no idea if the employees got free meals.
I used to hang out with Jeff Dean and he told me that Google and SGI both occupied the googleplex at the same time and the SGI employees looked sad because they had to pay for their meals.
I believe Charlie's (the main onsite cafe) has been renovated a few times although the basic layout was constant throughout my tenure (2007-2019) and in fact if you looked behind the curtains (literally), there was basically the equivalent of an archeological trash heap with generations of Google and SGI documents.
Over time Charlie's got worse and worse; the food quality dropped significantly and became quite monotonous (true for the other cafes as well), and Noname (eventually named Yoshka's) did too. In fact, every great cafe I remember attending was eventually replaced with a worse version of itself.
