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> Have these people never heard of REST or JSON?

I think the difficulty is really in schema matching/mapping.

Right. The systems healthcare.gov has to interface with are established and NOT subject to change. It is up to the new system to be interoperable with whats already there. And this is where this get hard: you have to be able to speak with a myriad of different systems, translate the data to and from the schema of each target system, and do it all securely and robustly. This is all much more complicated than most of the armchair critics realize.

It sounds, to me, like they should have created a centralised spec for talking to these external system. Then created teams to build the interfaces between that spec, and the external systems.

So for healthcare.gov to talk to Hospital Insurance Inc. it would actually talk to the Health Insurance Inc shim and THAT would talk to the third party.

Now you have a small(er) definable project that a team can deliver and that can be tested. 100 shims later and healthcare.gov can talk to anything because they all (appear to) use the same interface.

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