I am not even the person who said "I wouldn't call it another form of API"... can you maybe just stick to the concrete and explain how this is different from SOAP/WSDL or OpenAPI/Swaggar? I honestly don't even know what short term either I or you would now use for any of them, but I feel confident that the overall premise described by this article doesn't differentiate: they offer a standardized connector to various tools and data sources behind otherwise different APIs, even offering--through a registry such as UDDI--dynamic discovery of these resources. The only not-really-a-difference I feel is that we are explicitly describing wrapping the other APIs into this protocol... but like, that's what you'd of course have to do or expose an existing API via SOAP (which is also a capital-P-stands-for-Protocol).
Yup. Though it's a JSON API and not an XML API like SOAP. As for how it differs form the old OpenAPI/Swaggar... shrug... not much... its got a lot less flexibility to it and it has specific tooling for agentic tool use.
