> There has been no lack of heavyweight, pre-declare everything, code-generating, highly structured, prescriptive standards
Care to list them? REST mania started around early 2000-s, and at that time there was only CORBA available as a cross-language portable RPC. Microsoft had DCOM.
And that was it. There was almost nothing else.
It was so bad that ZeroC priced their ICE suite based on a PERCENTAGE OF GROSS SALES: https://web.archive.org/web/20040603094344/http://www.zeroc.... Their ICE suite was basically an RPC with a human-designed IDL and non-crazy bindings for C/C++/Java.
Then the situation got WORSE when SOAP came.
At this point, anything, literally anything, that didn't involve XML was greeted with enthusiasm.
> Care to list them?
From the top of my head, OData.
https://www.odata.org/
This is a recent project. REST happened basically in the environment where your choices were CORBA, DCOM, SOAP and other such monstrosities.
Of course, REST won handily. We're not in this environment anymore, thankfully, and REST now is getting some well-deserved scrutiny.
> This is a recent project.
OData officially started out in 2007. Roy Fielding's thesis was published in 2000.