The S Stands For Slippery

SOAP is getting slippery, enjoy a good anti-SOAP laugh. Well, not only a good laugh it will probably cause some Deja Vu if you have tried to gone through the specifications. Duncan Cragg provides a fictional, but practical, dialogue in favor of REST. It is not that it is always a cake walk with REST, but they are easier to fix. The ease comes out of the fact that the basic approach of REST is better for network, especially Web applications.

I side with REST, and with ROA. I think the basic idea behind SOAP of loose coupling and cross-platform communication was great, but it never got standardised and every wanna-be-pioneer created his own stack of implementation making it too heavy to use.

SOAP might still get used a lot, partly because of legacy and partly because of lack of understanding of its alternatives. It might also be because a lot of people do not really understand powers and capabilities of HTTP, like I did not when I started with Web.