SOAP is indeed on the way out but not quite for the reasons most people say. It's not just due to the overhead, or even the incompatibilities. These are symptoms of the fact that it's solving the wrong problem. SOAP is a way to tear your program apart and put half of it on one machine and half of it on another. REST is a design strategy that requires the absolute minimum of coordination, thus it scales somewhat better, like the web itself.
That said, magical RPC-injection protocols like SOAP often work really well for quick and dirty apps within a single organization.
Comments
Paul Prescod has written some very thoughtful articles on REST versus SOAP. See:
in particular: SOAP is indeed on the way out but not quite for the reasons most people say. It's not just due to the overhead, or even the incompatibilities. These are symptoms of the fact that it's solving the wrong problem. SOAP is a way to tear your program apart and put half of it on one machine and half of it on another. REST is a design strategy that requires the absolute minimum of coordination, thus it scales somewhat better, like the web itself.That said, magical RPC-injection protocols like SOAP often work really well for quick and dirty apps within a single organization.