There are these large corporations with a significant investment in their existing infrastructure and systems - and now they all need to make them interop. The mindset is “how do we make our CORBA ERP communicate with their Java CRM without needing to make any changes to either of them?”. Hence SOAP: It packages existing method-call semantics into a HTTP message that will cross a firewall: not even the IT dept needs to get involved to change firewall rules. And they hammered out a working spec within a couple years. That’s impressive considering the slow-moving nature of large, risk-averse enterprises. We now know that REST-is-Best, but it took the industry around 10 years to figure that out, and another 5 years for the tooling and ecosystem to catch up. SOAP was a quick-fix that was needed immediately.
So I’d recharacterise “Enterprise software” as “fits into your existing system and does what you need it to, right now” - and their MC Escher-inspired architecture is a consequence of it needing to support and fit-in to whatever systems were prevalent when their project was started.
It’s not Enterprise software that’s rigid and inflexible - but cutting-edge software that I have more problems with. I was working with Neo4j in 2016 and having issues with security because it didn’t have any built-in security support until last year. I had to change what I was doing to accommodate them, instead of vice-versa.
