Underground Standards

It is interesting to see how the software industry is moving away from a model of open standards ruling the day to what I will call underground standards (e.g. Spring, REST, Hibernate, XMPP). The underground standards appear to evolve with a key driving principal, simplicity. This reminds me of something someone told me when I was at MIT. If a computer scientist designed the web, it would have been too complex and never adopted. As computer scientists we need to keep working to simplify, simplify, simplify everything we design and build.

Some facts to think about:

• Spring reached 10k downloads in one month
• 87% of Amazon API users use the REST over SOAP
• EJB 3.0 is borrowing a lot of ideas from Hibernate
• Google Talk is using XMPP