eWEEK - Father of Java Has His Eye on 'Jackpot' "Gosling: The way that I look at it, people have been building Web services under different names for 20 or 30 years, so there are a lot of protocols that people have used to build communications between components and across networks, and they've been in pretty wide use for quite a long time. The distinction that SOAP brings to the party over CORBA and XML, some of them are interesting, but I wouldn't call any of them life-changing."