SOAP is for losers

SOAP is the worst thing happening to "Enterprise Computing" since, uhm, forever. His entirely asynchronous nature makes it idiotic to use it as backend for anything but the most simple of application. Here I am, waiting more than 5 minutes for feedback on a very simple table-based dialog after clicking "OK". The entire operation (changing some basic security settings) will take me more than half an hour. The same application, last year, had a Win32 client in which the exact same operation would never take more than 30 seconds. But now "we" moved to a "web" infrastructure, entirely built on SOAP+CORBA. The UI is now web-based, and when I click "OK", behind the scenes my server talks to another server, pushing loads of XML back and forward, and 9 times out of 10 the browser stalls while waiting for feedback. Nevermind that sometimes the operation fails, sometimes it actually succeeds. Last week, while internally demoing the next release (that should come out in a month) the lead designer tried to execute an action and it failed without giving any errors. The comment? "oh, it seems like she doesn't want to do it right now". And that was it. And now, of course, we lose contracts on performance. Don't say!